Afterland Read online

  Fisher: Tell me.

  JW: You think this one will be easier. You think you’re gonna get, what’s the word, inured, to all this death. But it hits you the same. It rips your guts out. Every single one. And you think at least if you’re dead too, you won’t feel it. You’ll be numb for real.

  Fisher: Do you know what forgiveness is?

  JW: Do I? Shit.

  Fisher: It means first you have to forgive yourself.

  (Sobbing)

  Fisher: Listen to me, Janetta. You were in the air force. If you really wanted to kill yourself, you would have used a gun. You didn’t because you wanted to live, Janetta.

  JW: No. No, I didn’t.

  Fisher: You wanted someone to see you. I see you, Janetta. I know your pain. We’ve all been through similar.

  (Unintelligible sobbing)

  Fisher: Why don’t you come with me. We have a contemplation room where you can sit for a while, until you feel better. It’s private, no one will bother you.

  JW: I don’t…I don’t (unintelligible).

  Fisher: I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Can you say that again please? I want to be able to hear you.

  JW: I don’t want to be…to be alone.

  Fisher: Then I’ll sit with you.

  JW: What about all these other people…waiting to talk to you, you got, you got a whole waiting room out there.

  Fisher: They don’t need me as much as you do right now. Come, Janetta. Come with me. I’ll stay with you as long as you need.

  (Recording ends)

  PART 2

  32.

  Billie: In A Strange Land

  Billie has the impression of trees. The construction of a forest. Someone has changed the wallpaper without telling her. She’s so cold and then she’s so hot, trying to tug off her shirt, but they won’t let her. Hands holding her down. A clatter of things swept to the floor.

  “Keep her still.”

  They force her head to the side, press it into the plastic tablecloth, red and white checks like a picnic blanket in a children’s book. Someone is trying to tug and scratch into her brain. She yelps in protest, tries to fight, but her arms are pinned to the table. A white-hot yank across her scalp, and her head unravels, memories unspooling in a ribbon across the floor.

  “Jesus, it smells terrible.” Rico’s voice. There’s someone gagging somewhere, nasty hairball sounds.

  “That’s an ugly one,” a stranger says, a husky too-many-cigarettes voice. But they’re all strangers here. No one knows her. No one cares. She moans as someone digs into the wound on her head.

  “It wasn’t cleaned properly. We’re going to have to cut this off.”

  Billie kicks out with a low moan. “Nooo.”

  “Relax, sunshine. It’s dead meat. It’s got to go,” raspy voice says.

  “Are you a doctor?” Billie manages, through the side of her mouth. The woman’s features are a pasty blur in her periphery, glimpsed through the hand wedging her face against the tablecloth that smells like cloves and soap.

  “Close as you’re going to get.”

  “I need a hospital. I need a fucking doctor.”

  “Shh, you’re making it harder on yourself. This will help.” A mosquito bite into her arm. Sharper than that.

  “You’re wasting the good drugs on her?”

  Dreaming of the night dentist. Boneyards and grinding horses into glue. Love and deceit. A smile of smiles in which the two smiles meet. All her secrets boiling out of her head in black oily smoke. Women’s voices around her, a susurration of starlings, congealing and separating in configurations she can’t make sense of.

  She wakes up, sweating and itching on a raw mattress in a bare room, walls covered with graffiti. Hours later, or days. Her hand, freed, goes automatically to the back of her head, the wound. There’s a bandage all the way up and over. Clean and white. Better than duct tape.

  No mirror in here, she realizes, getting up, carefully. Her bare arms are covered in tiny red bites. Bed bugs or fleas or mosquitoes or an allergic reaction to the dirty mattress. Lazy fat flies congregate on the sill below the dirty pane of glass with a splintered crack. They fizz against the window. The gangrene scent of rotting meat and flowers is gone, but she can still smell burning. That’s a sign you’re having a stroke. Or a brain aneurysm. Like her mother.

  There’s laughter from outside. Breaking glass. More laughter. Women in high spirits. She goes to the door, but her feet are sending mismatched signals and she staggers and smashes her shoulder into the doorframe, catching herself from falling down the stairs. Barely.

  “Careful,” Rico calls from her spot by the firepit across the way. She’s sitting in a camping chair, a petite woman with Coke-can red hair reclining in her lap, their legs entangled. “We can’t afford to keep patching you up.”

  “This isn’t Chicago.” She takes one step out the door and has to sit down, abruptly. She takes in the surrounds. Green filter. No, it’s the trees, dense, giving everything an emerald cast. The building behind her is an old farm house, falling apart, surrounded by lean-tos, all draped in camouflage netting. Out back, a dark corrugated warehouse with the windows boarded up, also wearing thick veils of camo. “What is this, a fucking meth lab?”

  The girl in Rico’s lap giggles.

  “Christ.” She breathes out. “All of America. Where is this?”

  “With friends, is all you need to know.” Rico is drunk, her words thick. A shattered bottle of cheap whisky lies in the firepit, among the burned-out coals and cigarette butts and green and brown and white broken glass from the liquor that came before, and the burned remains of a stuffed toy—a blue rabbit, mostly black now. “You should be grateful Ash patched you up.”

  “Look who’s up and at ’em. You’ve been out long enough. We were thinking we’d have to dig you a hole.” It’s the raspy voice, from last night. Not the redhead, someone else, with an undercut growing out, emerging from one of the other squat houses, holding a trio of beer bottles between her fingers. She’s wearing army pants and a camo sports bra, the better to show off the Celtic cross emblazoned across her stomach. Billie knows what that means.

  Nazi-trash jogs down the stairs, too chipper by half, to the firepit, and hands off two of the beers before slinging herself down on an upturned log. She takes a long slug from the third.

  “You a doctor?” Billie says, leaning against the doorjamb. Hanging out.

  “Was that a thank you?” Ash cups her ear, playful. “Saving your life.”

  “It was not,” Rico says, idly stroking the radioactive redhead’s pussy through her jeans. She whispers something in her ear that has her laughing and making sultry stoner eyes at Billie, getting off on the audience. As if Billie cares which of these animals fuck each other. “I’m afraid our friend here isn’t known for her sense of gratitude.”

  “Maybe if you got me a damn beer,” Billie says, already working out the angles. Fight fire with hell. There’s a treehouse way back in the woods, a jeep spray-painted black, two quad bikes. Not close enough to see if the keys are dangling in the ignition.

  “Help yourself,” Ash waves. “Fridge is up there.”

  Billie nods and picks her way across the scraggy grass to the other house, up the stairs to a threadbare kitchen. Cracked linoleum floor and more fat flies. The buzzing is a sick echo of memory. Dishes in the sink, some kind of chili on the stove, black beans and congealed cheese. Fresh enough, she reckons. She remembers the smell of it from last night. She swipes some of it into her mouth with two fingers, suddenly ravenous.

  A battered silver refrigerator hums and gurgles and she reaches in to find the beer. There are several four-packs taking up most of the room among the sad collection of ingredients: wilted broccoli, Monterey Jack cheese, more congealed beans, an open can of tuna, soy sauce and canola mayonnaise, a half-empty bottle of ketchup, spillage matted red and chunky as a headwound around the rim of the white cap, down the sides. Not much to work with. But she’ll make do. She always does.


  Wrestles a bottle from the plastic. Reminds her of people digging around in her head. She touches the bandage again automatically. At least the wound is bandaged. She really needs to find a mirror. And a bottle opener. It’s a craft beer, how civilized, Nebraska-made. That’s a clue. Maybe. “Don’t Step on Me,” the label on the bottle says.

  Past the kitchen, a passageway with that fake wood flooring peeling off the concrete, a warren of rooms leading off. Beaded curtain pegged to one side, a sheet hung up across another doorway. Human scuffling sounds inside. A toilet flushes somewhere deep in the house. Does a belligerent bear shit in the woods? Two inside, at least. Three at the firepit. Zara somewhere else.

  She sets the beer down on the kitchen table, same one she had her face pressed up against last night while they held her down. There are half moons of cut cable ties on the ground. She noses in the trash. Wadded wipes, bloodstained, right on top, mixed up with chili congealed on paper plates. Not bits of her brain. Condensation weeps down the side of the bottle.

  She scrabbles in the drawers for the bottle opener. Plastic knives and forks, chopsticks. Could drive that into someone’s eye. Kitchen scissors. Knives. She feels the heft of one, tests the edge, shoves it back in the drawer. Barely usable for cooking. Don’t bring a blunt knife to a gun fight. One against six. Maybe more. The odds aren’t in her favor.

  Finally, in the sink, she finds the bottle opener, tossed in among more plates, crusted with chili, and something beneath it that gives her pause: a drill. The bit is shiny and silver. Except where it’s not. Her hand goes to the back of her head.

  33.

  Cole: Shadows on the Cave Wall

  The heat is a tangible thing that reaches right in through the windows of the bus, like a giant’s palm pressing them down into the pattern on the seats; the hand of God, Cole thinks, making sure the Sisters of All Sorrows know their place, right on their butts, uphill and down, to share the word.

  Mila is leaning her head against the window one row ahead of her, the ghost reflection of her face in the glass transposed over the etched green of Colorado’s forests. Only her dark eyes are visible above the lurid veil of the Apologia—the Speak over her mouth that speaks for them now.

  Spoke up for you when you needed it.

  Indeed. Picked her up when she was on the ground, a mess, brought them both into the fold. Saved their asses. Praise be to the Lord she doesn’t believe in. But that’s part of being undercover. No longer Nicky the tennis coach or landscape designer, but Patience the penitent. She can work with that.

  They shouldn’t be in this situation. She screwed up. She fell apart right when Mila needed her the most. She’s supposed to be the grown-up. What did her dad use to say? “You need to pull yourself toward yourself.”

  Be gentle with yourself.

  No time, Dev. The guilt is still there, a monster wearing her skin, filling her from the inside, but it’s not eating her alive right now. She’s had her little mental breakdown and now she’s back up and at ’em. And Mila was so proud: of looking after her, of improvising this mad plan.

  “Coast to coast, Mom.” She’d pointed out the banner. “We can ride the bus all the way.”

  Your son’s a fucking genius, Dev.

  Gets it from me. Just saying.

  It’s not New York, where Kel says she has contacts. Or New Orleans, which would be closer. But they get a free ride, no need to scrounge or steal for cash for gas, something to eat, somewhere to sleep, and all the time the wheels on the bus are taking them farther and farther away. And who is going to look for them here? Find a crack, Patty said. Is this one big enough?

  It’s not so hard. She went to an Anglican school back in Joburg. And the Sisters are nutjobs, sure, but they’re kind to strangers. Kinder than she would have been. She’s taking it as an opportunity for moral instruction, getting to know them, learning their ways.

  Moonfaced Sister Generosity, of the broad shoulders and hips, is leading the bus in a sing-along. Some repurposed pop song she doesn’t know the words to, although Mila is humming the tune.

  All their given names are meant to be a reminder, it’s been explained to her, of the feminine virtue they need to work harder on to attain salvation and mercy and inner peace. But they all begin to sound alike after a while, and they’re not always an obvious match. If Sister Faith, their taciturn driver, nurses any doubts, she holds them close. Boss matron Sister Hope has surely never fallen into despair. But Chastity’s name suits the mischief in her dark eyes and the slink in her hips. Sex on legs, Devon would have said. Spiky ones. Like a praying mantis. All the better to bite off your head. Her name seems deliberately cruel, like Generosity’s, which feels like a fat joke rather than a comment on however mean or selfish she might have been before she converted. And then there’s Temperance, whose old needle-track marks show when she raises her arms and the sleeves fall back.

  To make things even better (not), her period has kicked in. Cole misses the IUD that occupied the parking space in her womb reserved for a baby and put an end to her periods for eight years. The ob-gyn at Ataraxia had taken it out, a year past its expiry date, so they could pump her full of hormones and harvest her world-saving eggs, even though she’s over forty, and in a normal world they wouldn’t even be willing to freeze them. Normal world is long gone, she thinks. Her periods started again a week later, cramps like her guts were being wrung out, glass splinters in her head, the dull ache in her joints. She had forgotten how awful they were, how much women relied on pain medication to get through. In Church doctrine, it’s even more than due punishment for Eve’s crimes of curiosity; it’s a reminder, every single month that women have failed, that they have not repented enough to bring back the men, let alone fulfill all women’s natural duty—to get knocked up.

  Their first night was in the Coyote Motel, down the road from the casino, three to a room, although the Sisters left them to their own devices in Room 103, ground floor, fully paid for, including breakfast.

  Hope seemed pleased to see them in the morning, as if they might have had a change of heart and taken off in the wee hours. To where, with what money, what wheels? The Merc’s still in the underground parking at the casino. Harder to find. Harder to trace them. They had breakfast in the motel coffee shop, with sneering waitresses and a cook who came out from the kitchen to ogle them. Which didn’t stop one of the servers coming out to the bus afterward and going around the back where the garbage cans were, to get a one-on-one repentance session with Chastity.

  One repentance is easy. Cole has seven days and seven nights of Confidances to go through before she can be accepted into the Church as a full-fledged Sister. Not baptized but “Mortified,” whatever the hell that means. No one will tell her. But they’ll be gone before then. Hopefully. But in the meantime, she has to sit with Sister Hope and her digital recorder and her notes for two hours a day, at the start of every morning, the end of every long day of trying to sway hearts and minds. Confessing her sins, weaving imaginary ones she thinks will satisfy them together with enough truth to be convincing.

  The Repentnals are easier. Like drama class. She can lose herself in the display of public mourning that inevitably gets them chased out of wherever they are that Hope has decided is an embassy of sin.

  Yesterday it was a sex shop in downtown Denver, where the enraged owner tried to assault Sister Generosity with a Hitachi Magic Wand. She underestimated their capacity to bear humiliation, though, and eventually, teary with frustration, both owner and the flustered cashier held hands with them and submitted to the Word. They drove past the store later, on the way out of town, and Mila tapped on the glass to point it out to Cole: still open for business. Sorry doesn’t always stick. But being annoying is an excellent disguise.

  At least it’s not Scientology, and it’s only for now. They will be gone, sliding safely across the Atlantic, before it’s time for her Mortification. Riding the bus to salvation, but not the way the Church intends. Sorry, Sister Hope. All t
hey have to do is stick it out until Miami. Nuns on the run.

  Sure, there are complications. She had to hand over all their worldly possessions (minus half the cash, tucked into her bra) and “Wi-Fi is a tie to the world, and its temptations,” so she has no way of letting Kel know where they are, where they’re going. On the plus side, it means no one can track her. No more FBI phishing mails pretending to be her dead sister. But there are stops along the way. There are Hearts to visit (whatever that means), and she’s ready to seize the internet the first moment she can.

  The bastardized pop-song hymn has segued into a cover of something else, with clumsy replacement lyrics. She knows this one, unfortunately; the tune is Madonna’s “Material Girl.”

  Cause we are living in a godless world

  And I am a girl starved of His grace.

  You know that we are living in a godless world

  And to the light I must turn my face.

  Cole leans forward between the seats, one hand on Mila’s shoulder. “I hope they paid a fair rate for licensing and butchering.”

  She grunts an acknowledgment.

  “Are you regretting this?”

  “More than everything else that’s happened?” She sighs, and gives Cole’s hand a double squeeze between her shoulder and her neck in a shrug hug. Their Morse code.

  “It’s fine, Mom. It’s just for now, right? We’ve got to, I dunno, cowgirl up.”

  “I think that’s my line.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  “Sisters.” Generosity mercifully turns down the volume on the sing-along. “We’re making excellent time today, so because it’s the day of rest—”

  “Not for me,” Faith mutters from behind the wheel.

  “We’re going to make a sightseeing stop at a site of historic significance!”

  “Don’t go thinking this is the Magic School Bus,” Faith says, as those who have loosened their hair or shrugged off their veils secure them again, disappearing into the cozy uniformity of their outrageous modesty.