Afterland Read online

  “Hey, squirt,” Jay reached out a hand to poke Miles’s badge. “I like your pin.”

  “Hi, Jay,” was all Cole could manage, before the words caught in her throat. His bare head, the lack of eyebrows and lashes making his eyes look huge.

  “You wanna come sit up here with me?” Jay said, patting the bed.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea…”

  “It’s okay,” Devon said. “Tayla says the girls do it all the time. Just take your shoes off, buddy.”

  “Watch the tubes and shit. Hang on, let me raise the back. You want to do it, press this button. But not too far or you might fold the bed in half.”

  “What’s it feel like?” Miles said, squirming in next to Jay, although not quite touching him.

  “It hurts when I pee. Like, a lot. And chemo sucks. It’s not working anyway.”

  “Jay…” Devon warned.

  “What? I’m not gonna lie to him.” He was angry. Understandable. “You can handle the truth, right, squirt?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Fuck cancer!”

  “Fuck cancer.” But her son glanced over at her like he needed permission before he scrambled up.

  “Hey, Jay, Miles made you a comic.”

  “Get outta town.” Jay waved a hand. She couldn’t help but see the way the veins stood out, the pockmark scabs from all the needles that had been stuck in. “You made me a comic?”

  “Yeah, it’s about monster babies who take over the world.”

  “Oh, yeah, I see that. Tell me about this guy, he looks scary.”

  “That’s Eruptor, he’s got a volcano head and when he gets mad, boom! Molten hot lava and burning rocks everywhere! Melt your face off.”

  “I feel like that sometimes.”

  “And this is Sssss. He’s a snake, with arms, and he can shoot spiders from his hands.”

  “Is it a specific type of spider, like black widows, or what are those scary ones you have in South Africa?”

  “Wolf spiders! Or baboon spiders? Those are the ones that look like tarantulas. Sssss can shoot any kind of spider he wants!”

  “Oh, cool, cool.” Jay was flagging.

  “And this is their arch-nemesis, Grammaphone, who is an evil old lady with an old record player for her head who wants to adopt all the monster babies and take them in her time machine back to the days when everything was black and white, and you didn’t even have the internet.”

  “That’s sounds like a terrible place. Hey, squirt, I’m getting really tired. Can we catch up later?”

  “’Kay,” Miles said, slipping off the bed. Cole wasn’t sure who was more relieved.

  “C’mon.” She put her arm around her son. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  But Cole only took him back twice more to see his cousin. There were a lot of horrible words that came between them and him. Adenocarcinoma. Gleason score. Distant metastasis. Adjuvant therapy. Recrudescence. Advance directive. And one they only talked about back at home. Assisted dying.

  She learned that humans use the word “unbearable” too readily. It turns out that what’s unbearable is living through it. Jay died at home, in his sleep, a month later. Morphine will do that. If you were lucky enough to have access to morphine, if you were among the first.

  There was nothing to say, except the unspeakable. The guilt was a brutish animal pacing and snarling in the confines of her rib cage. She was afraid to open her mouth in case she let the animal’s words slip. Thank God. Thank God it was your son and not mine. Knowing that Tayla and Eric were running the resentment counter: How dare you still have a child who is living and breathing?

  Anything can become a black hole if you compress it enough. That’s how Tayla reacted: collapsed in on herself under the density of her grief, sucking up the light. Eric went the other way, falling into busywork to keep the pain at bay, trying to cheer up the girls, taking on homework and cooking and cleaning. Offers of help took away the only thing he was holding on to. Devon tried, but it only drove Eric into another room, onto another task.

  It made Cole anxious, the way Eric would suddenly notice Miles—if he bustled into the room to find him sitting on the couch with the girls, all of them staring intently at the TV like the commercials were the best thing ever—and flinch. Every single time. Miles felt it too. He was clunky with nerves, dropping things, tripping on the stairs. “When can we go home?” he’d asked, repeatedly.

  They should have gone home.

  “We don’t belong here,” she argued in heated whispers to Devon. There was other family: Eric’s parents and sisters, who were eager to offer support. Miles needed stability. He needed to be at home. He needed his dad’s full attention.

  And she was afraid it was contagious. She didn’t know it was already too late. They agreed to a compromise. A three-month contract job in Oakland, so Devon could be closer to Tayla and the family. But then Eric got sick, and so did Devon, and then no one was flying anywhere. You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months. You just can’t.

  5.

  Cole: Wicked Things

  They should have been farther along by now. But paranoia will slow you down when you’re avoiding the highways and the possibility of police checkpoints. Dogs can sniff out gender. Cops get annoyed when you can’t show them proper ID. There’s probably an APB out on them. Murderer. Drug smuggler. Boy trafficker. Wanted felon.

  Bad mother.

  Bad mother is the worst thing you can possibly be.

  But off-the-beaten-track has its own risks. Lack of food and gas stations, for example, or fallen trees across the road that mean having to turn around and retrace eighty miles, pretending not to be crying with frustration behind the sunglasses she claimed from the last abandoned gas station. Pathetic.

  The tank is down to a quarter full and they need to refuel. And the bitch about the new world order: it requires money, same as the old one. She feels betrayed by all the apocalypses of pop culture that promised abandoned cities ripe for the looting. But then again, they also haven’t encountered any shambling undead, small-town utopian havens with dark underbellies, highwaymen, or crazed militias. There are a surprising number of towns still functioning and other cars on the road. Proof of life. Aluta continua. But they’re not going to be able to continua much longer without cash money, and the prices posted on the last gas station they passed were sell-both-kidneys expensive. Watching the burning oil fields in Nigeria and Saudi on the news, the riots in Qatar during those long weeks of Devon being hollowed out by the fucking cancer. What’s the worst part of acting like it’s the end of the world as we know it? Inability to imagine that it might not be.

  She’s so unprepared for all this. Miles needs a Ripley, a Furiosa, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, and instead, he’s got her. Commercial paper artist. Ex-commercial paper artist. At least she picked up some things over the last few years. Thank you, military quarantine and all the courses on previously male-dominated skills they offered to keep the surviving relatives occupied. Now she can shoot a gun, do a basic tune-up on a car, and perform essential life-saving paramedic skills. But she can’t fly a helicopter and she can’t forge a passport, and if Miles gets really sick, or she does, they’re fucked. What she needs is cash money in hand, to pay for gas, and a hot meal, and to get online, email Keletso, ask for help, figure out a plan. The great escape from America.

  Or you could turn yourself in.

  Over your dead body, husbandguy, she snipes back. Not an option. Not with everything they’ve already been through. There are consequences to her actions. The sky is striped with pink and orange above the forest lining the road, and she takes the off-ramp for Lake Tahoe on a whim, remembering a cigarette ad in the cinema from when she was a kid and such things were still legal. She can’t remember the brand, but it featured impossibly pretty white people in neon eighties ski gear swiping down the mountain. She had never seen snow before, and it seemed so glamourous and cool. And the dumb slogan that had dated so badl
y, what was it? People with a taste for life. That’s it. That’s her. Taste for life, and a different kind of future from the one everyone else wants to prescribe for them.

  As she descends the winding road, they can see down to the lake and the cabins arrayed along the shore, a single speedboat tearing a snow-white rip across the dark blue water below. On the main drag, it’s ski shops and tattoo parlors and internet cafes and a bustle and a hustle on the streets. It would be so easy to forget, to think it’s life as normal, until you realize, again, a punch to the gut, that there are no men among the people going about their business this evening. Should be used to it by now, she knows, but they haven’t been out in the world for a while.

  She picks a likely spot. The Bullhead Grill & Bar is all lit up like Christmas, with a parking lot full of cars and people inside bathed in a welcoming yellow light.

  Not a trap.

  Maybe, she thinks. “You ready, tiger? To deal with actual human beings again?”

  “What if they know, Mom. What if they take one look at me and—”

  “They won’t. Trust me.” She refastens one of the sparkly barrettes dangling above Mila’s ear. “See, perfect disguise.”

  “Mmph.”

  “Just like this place,” she continues, talking to reassure them both as they crunch across the parking lot. She pushes the door open into the sports bar with bare brick walls and warm copper fixtures. “It wants you to believe it’s a dive, but it’s only playing.”

  “So hipster,” Mila agrees, looking up at the monochrome photographs of biker guys posing with their hogs, facial hair like topiary.

  “And nostalgia porn,” Cole grimaces, because the TVs mounted above the bar are blaring vintage Superbowl highlights reels, men in helmets hurling themselves against each other with mesmerizing violence. It’s like watching forces of nature, waves smashing against lighthouses or palm trees lashing in a hurricane. The customers watch with hopeless hunger.

  She picks a spot at the bar, down the far side where she can get a full view of the place, near a pillar for cover, and also close to the emergency exit. Just in case. A Coke and another Coke, after she sees the cost of whisky. There was a crumpled hundred-dollar bill in the key bowl back at Eagle Creek and that’s not going to get them far. Down to eighty-six and change now. She’s not sure what the plan is, exactly. Beg, borrow, or steal.

  Pick a likely target, boo.

  In the booth opposite, there’s a couple with two little girls, eight-ish, in baby doll dresses and Shirley Temple curls, as if they’re fresh off the stage at the local kid beauty pageant. The moms, in lumberjack plaid and big black boots, keep making vague friendly intimations in their direction—a smile, a nod, to acknowledge they’re in the same gang. Last of the reproducers.

  “Why are they dressed like that?” Mila is aghast at the little girls.

  “Maybe it’s a special occasion.” She shrugs.

  “Or they’re also boys in drag,” she whispers.

  Cole thinks, says almost to herself, “More like nostalgia-for-a-moment-that-hasn’t-passed-yet. When there aren’t going to be any more kids, you want to hold on to their childhoods for as long as you can. There must be a German word for that. Nostalgenfreude. Kindersucht.”

  “Yeah, well, I think they hate it.” Mila does a sideways tilt of her head at the one who keeps tugging at her falling-down knee socks.

  “You don’t want to get the look?”

  “No way!”

  “Noted.” Cole fiddles with the paper from Mila’s straw, carefully tearing it down along the seam to fold out. It keeps her hands busy. Goddamn, she could use a drink.

  Sounds like something your father would say. Ghostguy in her head.

  Cirrhosis of the liver would be the least of her problems right now. The pair of them probably reek of desperation, seeping through her pores along with actual stink—that muggy human swampland smell of long hours on the road, mixed up with eau de guilt, sour notes of worry. She hasn’t spoken to another adult human since the night before they left Ataraxia; the argument with Billie, shouting, running all the faucets in the bathroom so they wouldn’t be overheard by the home assistants installed in every luxury subterranean apartment, and definitely, definitely eavesdropping on their private conversations.

  She sneaks a glance at the TVs, wary of her face appearing below the banner Breaking News or Crime Stop! But American football’s greatest hits continues unabated. She irons the split straw wrapper down with her palm, makes four little tears for the legs. Focus. Choose someone who isn’t going to miss their wallet.

  The bartenders and waitstaff are out, not only because she once worked service. They’ll be the most sober and alert people in here. Not the woman drinking a beer alone at the bar, or the two look-alike blonds who could have stepped out of that long-ago cigarette commercial; they’re clearly on a first date, leaning in toward each other across the table. Most promising: the cluster of girls-night-outers (a.k.a. every night out now) at the big table by the window, brash and brassy and three bottles of wine down. Their loud laughter sounds defensive. Or maybe she’s projecting.

  She’s never stolen anything in her life. No shoplifting nail polish or earrings from the Johannesburg malls in acts of brazen teen girl rebellion. Not like Billie, who would stuff a pillow under her dress and pretend to be pregnant at sixteen, summoning the disapproving ire of old ladies, and reaping the benefits of others’ best intentions. Do-gooders would buy her packs of nappies and formula from the discount pharmacies, which she’d return twenty minutes later in exchange for cigarettes and Cokes, then turn around and sell them to the other kids at school. Always the entrepreneur, Cole thinks, folding out little legs, twisting a trunk for her straw paper sculpture. She sets it down on the ketchup packet.

  “I’m going to pee. Guard my elephant, will you. The backpack, too.”

  Mila pokes the sad twisted straw beast dubiously. “Mom, this is an insult to elephants.”

  But Cole is watching the middle-aged redhead from the ladies-who-dine table, who is picking her way toward the bathroom with the careful deliberation of the very drunk, her zebra-print purse drooping from her shoulder.

  When she gets there, the ladies’ restroom is empty. Above the mirror on the polished concrete, neon lights declare “youth has no age” in cursive, which is so irritating she wants to break the mirror. Also because she has lost an opportunity.

  There’ll always be another one, Devon used to say, which is about as helpful right now as the greeting-card message on the wall. That logic might have applied back when she had to pass up the artists’ residency in Prague because Miles was only six months old and still breastfeeding. But cute aphorisms do not cut it when the opportunity in question will determine whether they starve to death in the desert in their car with a redline fuel gauge. They do not fucking cut it at all.

  She exits the ladies’ and shoves open the door into the men’s instead. The redhead throws her a baleful glare, all right, no need to make an entrance, and goes back to touching up her lipstick in the mirror, which does not, mercifully, have any messages of Tumblr wisdom above it. Her purse is resting on the edge of the sink, unzipped, revealing its innards, including a matching zebra-print wallet.

  “Hey, honey, you got any powder?” she says.

  “Oh. Um. Let me see. Maybe I have something.” Cole pats down her pockets as if she has ever been the kind of woman prone to carrying surplus cosmetics.

  “Thanks. I’m all sweaty.” Her ankles flex, doing double time in the strappy heels to counteract her sway. “Didn’t even want to come out. But it’s Brianna’s birthday. The big five-oh.” She pauses, holding tight on to the sink, glaring at her reflection, eyes bleary.

  “That’s a big one all right.” Cole edges closer to the purse. She has no idea how she’s going to do this.

  Can’t be harder than murder.

  “We had a suicide pact, you know. If we hit forty, and we were still single. Or we’d get married to each other. See how
well that turned out!” She gives a little burp against the back of her fingers, the kind that often presages vomiting. “Hey. Can I ask you something?”

  “I don’t have any powder, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you even like eating pussy?”

  “I think it’s an acquired taste,” Cole manages, and then Mila bursts into the bathroom, clutching their backpack.

  “Mom!”

  The drunk woman startles, staggers, and knocks her purse off the counter. It spills its guts across the floor.

  “Miles!” She corrects herself, “Mila!”

  “Awwww shit,” says the redhead, “Aww. I think I busted my heel.”

  “Sorry! I didn’t know where you were! You weren’t in the ladies! You have to tell me!”

  “Not your fault.” Cole sees Mila’s eyes flick to the purse and the scattered possessions. She shakes her head, short, sharp.

  “I’ll get your things,” Mila says, ignoring her. Fuck. Cole takes the woman’s arm, to steal her attention, injects surprised warmth into her tone. “Hey, steady there. You okay?”

  “My shoe,” she says, miserable, up on one leg and swaying, trying to see. “Busted.” She gives another little burp.

  “No, look. It’s the strap. It’s come loose. Here, I’ll help you.” Cole bends down to fasten it, hoping she doesn’t get puked on.

  “Well aren’t you the sweetest.” Behind her, Mila scoops up the lipstick, a set of keys attached to a foam rubber bobbin of the dancing girl-emoji, restaurant mints, a pack of nicotine gum, a used-up tube of fancy handcream, several tampons. Her fingers hesitate over the striped wallet, which has flipped open. Useless plastic cards. And dollar bills, neatly extracted, palmed away into her fist.

  “Here we go, ma’am.” Mila presses the purse into the drunken woman’s arms, radiant with innocence.

  “And you. You are also the sweetest.” She goes in to pat Mila’s cheek. “You must look after this one,” the woman sighs. “I never had kids. Never will. Didn’t want them, but now. Now I don’t have that choice. Nobody will ever again. It’s so sad. Isn’t it? Oh, it’s all too much. I can’t bear it.” She digs into her purse for tissues.