PDF for European laserprinters - Chicago Center for Literature

Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
Long Live Us
Stories by Mark R. Brand
©
Copyright 2013, Mark R. Brand. Released under a Creative
Commons license; some rights reserved.
Printed and distributed by the Chicago Center for Literature
and Photography. First electronic edition: September 2013.
Cover image: “Expedition 36 Launch Countdown, May 28,
2013” by NASA/Bill Ingalls. Used under the terms specified at
the NASA website.
This book is available in a variety of electronic formats,
including EPUB for mobile devices, MOBI for Kindles, and
PDFs for both American and European laserprinters, as well
as a special deluxe paper edition. Find them all, plus a plethora
of supplemental information such as interviews, videos and
reviews, at:
cclapcenter.com/longliveus
Contents
Red Rocket
5
Potluck19
Nose Goblins
27
The Tree Over Garret’s Hole
40
The Insurgents
47
She Was Never Free to Begin With
50
Habitat for Humanity
69
The Woman in the Pit
78
For Paul, Sara, and Jeramy,
and all the other workers, parents,
and young people of the Great Recession.
Long live us.
Red Rocket
5 | Long Live Us
Darryl was waiting outside the principal’s office when he realized
his hands really hurt. It had been half an hour and he just felt it
now.
“Is your dad really an astronaut?” Caleb asked him.
“Yeah,” Darryl said, noticing for the first time the
scratches across the backs of his knuckles and feeling the scrape
on his elbow. He must have fallen. He didn’t remember.
“Wow,” Caleb said. “That’s cool.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay.”
Mrs. Greene walked by. She was the only secretary in the
office today and she sat across from them at the reception desk.
Usually she was nice to everyone, and had a bowl of mint candies
that she’d put out and look the other way when kids took a whole
handful. Today she was trying her best to seem disappointed in
him, but it wasn’t really her nature. The best she could manage
was to arch one eyebrow disapprovingly over the rims of her
glasses and look down at her computer screen.
There were three chairs outside the principal’s office and
one was empty. Jerry would have filled it, but he was first to go
in. A man and a woman had come into the office later and gone
inside. The man looked sort of friendly, in a distant way; harmless
at least. The woman, with that chin and those cheekbones, could
be no one but Jerry’s mom. She looked like someone had carved
a rough sculpture of a woman out of frozen mud from a cow
pasture and then put clothes on it. She glanced steadily in his
direction as she went in, but didn’t make a face or anything.
It occurred to Darryl then that they had probably called
his mom, too. Any minute she might walk through the door and
do her thing where she’d be on his side instantly and without
question. He didn’t want her on his side this time because that
would only make him feel worse. The fact that she believed him
incapable of what he’d just done might be enough to make him
cry, even, and that would be the worst. She’d ask him if he was
okay and if he thought he needed to see the nurse and he’d say
No, Mom. And she’d say oh my God Darryl your hands and he’d
say I’m fine Mom. But she wouldn’t listen. She’d assume she knew
what had happened and he’d probably just keep his mouth shut
and let her do her momma-bear thing, roaring at whomever she
thought might be threatening her cub. And she could roar.
This was, in fact, the second time in as many months that
Darryl had sat in this same chair. Last time it was because he’d
had a disagreement with his teacher Mrs. Trudeau. It was one
of those mornings where Mom had gotten up too late to wake
him up and he hadn’t had time to get his cereal before they flew
out the door. He’d been having a bad day to begin with, and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wasn’t improving it any. Why
anyone cared what this tedious kid did and how his lame trip on
the Mississippi River turned out was anyone’s guess, but it just
didn’t hold his attention even when Mrs. Trudeau stopped trying
6 | Long Live Us
to make Jerry McMillan and his dillweed friends stutter through
it and just read it to them herself.
She’d said something like are we keeping you awake,
Mister Bradley and he’d said no, before he realized that this
technically meant he had just admitted he was sleeping. As he
was still settling on it in his head that she was sort of a harpy for
asking a trick question like that, she followed it up with is there a
reason you’re not paying attention to the book then, and he said
Yeah, it’s stupid. She said there’s no such thing as a stupid book
and he said Yeah, there is.
Mrs. Trudeau gave him a flat look that suggested she
might have melted him with jets of flame from her eyes and left
the remains of him a tiny black pile of ash in his chair. Instead,
she made a fake little you asked for it, see if I care shrug and
commanded him to go directly to the office. This show of selfcontrol did actually make Darryl feel a twinge of shame, but he
had more or less gone back to hating her by the time he walked
all the way down to the door marked “Principal.”
When Mr. Mikan opened the door to his office the first
time and saw Darryl sitting there, he looked around and up and
down the hallway, as if he thought there would be someone else
as well. It seemed to surprise him that Darryl was alone.
“Everything all right?” he asked Darryl. He heard Mr.
Mikan’s voice twice a day for the school announcements and to
say the Pledge of Allegiance, but he couldn’t recall ever having
an actual conversation with him before.
“Umm…” Darryl said. He wasn’t sure what Mr. Mikan
meant by ‘everything.’
“Are you here for me?” he asked. Darryl nodded. “Oh.
Well, come in then.”
The furniture was Steelcase car-salesman business junk
all the way, but at least it was quiet and carpeted; the desktop
was free of greasy fingerprints and stray pen marks, and the
chairs were soft office chairs instead of those hard ones in all
the classrooms. For a place you got sent if you were in trouble,
it struck Darryl that Mr. Mikan’s office was maybe the most
pleasant place in the whole school to be.
“Which room are you in?” Mr. Mikan asked him. Darryl
told him. “Why did Mrs. Trudeau send you here?” Darryl told
him this, too. “Hmm…Well, do you know what you did wrong?”
Darryl said he thought it seemed to him like he was guilty mostly
of not liking Huckleberry Finn. “Aren’t we all,” said Mr. Mikan,
which surprised Darryl a little. “I’m going to let you in on a little
secret; I think it’s kind of a stupid book too, or at least not a very
good one. But what you did wrong wasn’t thinking that. What
you did wrong was telling that to Mrs. Trudeau.”
Darryl smiled at the reasonableness and obviousness of
this. He felt sheepish, but not really ashamed anymore, and he
knew instantly that this wasn’t a mistake he’d make again. Mr.
Mikan seemed suddenly like the most reasonable person he had
spoken to in weeks, actually sort of a decent guy and trying to
help. Wow, he thought, why did I do that? I could have just not said
anything. That was so the smarter thing to have done. Now I’m here
wasting this busy man’s time and instead of being irritated he’s really
being actually pretty nice about the whole thing. And then he felt sort
of bad again.
“I’m really sorry about this, Mr. Mikan,” he said, and
meant it.
“I understand, Darryl,” he said. “Can we agree that this
won’t happen again?”
“Sure. Yes.”
Mr. Mikan then asked him what else was going on in his
life and if he had any brothers or sisters. He said he didn’t, and
he explained that he was an only child and lived with his mom.
When Mr. Mikan asked if he ever got to see his dad, he just said
no. He didn’t tell Mr. Mikan that his dad was an astronaut and
had left when he was five to go on a mission to the moon, but
this was mostly because now that he was nine, it felt somehow
harder to explain why his dad had been gone so long. His mother
insisted it was true, but four years was a long time.
Mr. Mikan smiled. “All right. Have a seat out there for ten
more minutes and I’ll have Mrs. Greene write you a note to go
back to class.”
“Thanks.”
“Have a good day. Be good.”
“Okay.”
7 | Long Live Us
There were such things as stupid books.
He remembered once showing his mom one he’d found in
the front of the church vestibule under a thick stack of pamphlets
that he supposed Father Benet used to restock the display inside
the main doors. There under seventy copies of How Do You Speak
to God? and He is Forgiveness (the syntax of which always sort of
puzzled him when he said it out loud) was a book for little kids
called Red Rocket.
Red Rocket was old. Older than Darryl, and maybe even
older than his mom. It was a hardcover with a little bit of a
warped tilt to it, so that when opened and closed the silver-foilfiligree spine wouldn’t necessarily line each page directly over the
next. The lower outside corners of each page had worn spots the
size and shape of thumbtips from endless goings-through by the
hands of other children. It didn’t appear to have any good reason
for being in a church except it looked like maybe Jesus himself
had once read it as a kid.
The story was about a boy named BEN, which was
capitalized because whoever had written it thought that
capitalizing it would make the characters’ names stick out more.
BEN had a dog named BING and the two of them were pals.
This wasn’t the stupid part. Even when he was younger Darryl
could grasp the conventions of a good story, and everyone knows
that if your name and your dog’s name appear in all capitals in a
8 | Long Live Us
book together, it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll be friends.
The stupid part was that BEN and BING somehow got
hold of a ROCKET, and they of course decided that it would be
oh-so-very-swell to use the ROCKET to go to the MOON.
I’m with you, thought the younger, six-year-old Darryl
as he stood in the front of the church waiting for his mom to
finish talking to the priest. Who could guess what those two were
droning on about? It was never anything that felt to Darryl like
he should be listening in on. Red Rocket was the reason he wasn’t
sitting in one of the pews staring up at the huge life-sized Jesus
on the cross behind the altar, wondering for the hundredth time
if those nails had really hurt as bad as they looked like they did.
For rescuing him from this fate, he could momentarily forgive
Red Rocket for being the implausible festival of plot-holes that it
was.
When BEN and BING got to the MOON, however, they
discovered it was made of GREEN CHEESE! They (they being
the book’s author, Mary O’Callahan) said it that way, with the
exclamation point, like it was a big reveal or a huge happy surprise
or a combination of both. There were all kinds of problems with
this. First of all you couldn’t land a rocket on a planet made
of cheese because the fire from the thruster part would melt it.
Second of all, who would go there if all that was there was green
cheese? Thirdly, this was during that first long year that seemed
to stretch out forever, when he had still been absolutely sure that
his dad was on the moon, and why would his dad leave for so
long just for that?
So Darryl took Red Rocket to the back of the church where
Mom was sitting in the little room with Father Benet again. They
were in there, he could tell, because the three of them were the
only people in the entire church. That, and he could hear them
mumbling softly on the other side of the doors.
“Mom,” he said.
The mumbling stopped.
“Yeah, babe?” Mom said. She always called him babe,
which made him feel vaguely uncomfortable.
“I wanna show you something.”
“Just a minute, sweetie.”
They went on mumbling in their room for a while longer
and Darryl thought he might have heard her crying a little bit.
He wished they would both just shut up with all of this God
nonsense, but mostly he wished they would stop talking in that
little room. Nothing good ever seemed to come of it. Finally she
emerged with red blotches around her eyes where she had been
wiping at them with one of those cheap purse-size tissues that
didn’t have lotion on it.
“You doin’ okay?” she asked. This was another thing
Mom did when she was upset. She asked if everyone else was
okay. It was hard to keep her on task about things sometimes.
“I found this,” he said, showing her the book. She glanced
at it.
“That’s nice, babe. Come on, get your coat.”
“It says—”
“Let’s put that back now, okay? It’s for the littler kids. It’s
time to go. We need to get in the car.”
“No, Mom, look.”
“I’m going to count to three…”
This is what she did when she for some reason thought he
was still four years old. He put the book back and got on his coat.
9 | Long Live Us
Years later, when he was old enough to use the computer, he
would spend a lot of time searching for information about the
moon. He only partially understood what he found—words like
regolith and ecliptic sounded awesome when he said them out
loud, even though he wasn’t quite sure what they meant—but
he did confirm his suspicion that everyone knew the moon was
made of rock, not cheese. Older now, he wondered what that
O’Callahan woman was thinking, writing something for little
kids that suggested the moon was made of cheese. What if some
other kid like him had a dad who went to the moon and read Red
Rocket? He thought maybe she had cheese instead of brains.
Mom used to spend a lot of time on the computer, too.
Emailing people. Darryl could never tell who it was because she
always shut her laptop when she walked away from it and she
had a wicked password on it that he couldn’t guess. Sometimes
when he was in bed, he’d hear her typing away frantically and
when he’d get up and ask her what she was doing, she’d snap the
lid shut and smile at him. Sometimes she’d cry when she did this,
but Mom cried all the time so that wasn’t really all that alarming
anymore. What did get his attention were the times when she’d
be typing and he’d catch her smiling at the screen. Mom didn’t
smile much.
“Maybe she’s got a boyfriend,” Caleb said one time, when
they were having a backyard tent sleepover. Darryl hadn’t ever
thought of that.
“Why would she have a boyfriend?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged.
Caleb was a good friend and they’d known each other
for what seemed like a very long time, though the both of them
were only nine and Darryl had just moved into the neighborhood
two years before. They weren’t yet all that interested in girls, but
occasionally they’d hear them say something interesting, and
since boyfriend-girlfriend talk was usually something the girls
would bring up, Darryl suspected Caleb had gotten the idea from
one of them.
“It’s what happens in movies and stuff,” Caleb suggested.
“She’s still married to my dad, though.”
“Oh,” Caleb agreed quickly. “Right.”
There wasn’t a way to stop thinking about something like
that, though, once he started. And for some reason that’s what
he was thinking about when he was getting ready to stand up and
10 | Long Live Us
do his My Dad speech in his class.
Mrs. Trudeau had given them this as homework three
weeks ago, and after sitting through half of the speeches it
was almost Darryl’s turn. Mrs. Trudeau had called them
“presentations” but really they were speeches. Like everything
the woman did, this had some deeper purpose: to make them
better at talking in front of people or to make them appreciate
their dads more, or whatever. Darryl didn’t like giving speeches,
and he was not looking forward to it. Mostly because like with
Mr. Mikan he didn’t really want to talk about his dad.
It was supposed to be five minutes long and be a detailed
description of his father. It was okay to talk about what kinds
of sports your dad liked if your dad didn’t have a job, and a
couple of kids talked about their grandfathers because their dads
had died or their parents had gotten divorced. These kids cried
sometimes when they talked about it and it made everyone feel
awkward like the air had too much air in it.
For a while he thought he might just make something up
or refuse to do the speech altogether and let Mrs. Trudeau give
him a bad grade, but she was such a goat he thought she might
make him do it anyway without any preparation at all, which
would be five of the longest, stuttering, most humiliating minutes
of his life. Plus he hadn’t told Mom about the assignment at all,
and he didn’t want her to be mad at him for that. While he was
making up his mind, he asked his mom to go to the planetarium.
He mostly thought planetariums were baby-ish but if he had
to talk about his dad like that, he’d need to know more about
what he was doing on the moon. Mom never talked about it or
elaborated further than “Oh, you know. Astronaut stuff. Why?”
she added quickly, looking at him. Just wondering he told her. This
seemed to settle her, though she did give him a smile that was a
little forced. If Mom didn’t want to talk about it like always, there
wasn’t much he could do to make her, but this wouldn’t fill five
whole minutes in front of the class and Mrs. Trudeau. He needed
to see for himself.
The planetarium proved mostly disappointing. The part
where you sat in chairs in a little theater and watched the lights
on the domed ceiling was pretty cool, he guessed, though the
only thing that made it better than just watching TV was how
loud it was when the announcer said Mars, the red planet! over
the gigantic echo-ey speakers in the darkened room. Most of
the other exhibits were boring dioramas of the solar system and
wall-sized star maps. The gift store was full of crummy t-shirts
that looked a hundred years old and toy chemistry sets and
microscopes, which looked sort of cool until you realized they
were just cheap plastic crap made to look like the real thing and
even if they did work all you were supposed to do with them was
learn. There was one thing he saw, though, that made the whole
trip worth it.
At the end of the hallway outside of the projection dome,
far down by the bathrooms, was a glassed-in case set into the
wall. It didn’t call a lot of attention to itself, but Darryl was
transfixed. Inside was a display that held a lump of gray rock.
The description next to it said that this was a lunar meteorite, a
chunk of rock that had fallen to Earth from the moon. Darryl
tried to imagine it coasting through space. There would have
been no air around it to make a whooshing sound, and with no
up or down in space it would have seemed not to move at all as
it drew closer to the blue and white and green ball, felt the tug
of Earth’s gravity, and then fell miles and miles through the sky,
hitting so hard it left a crater in the ground.
The label on the display didn’t give any indication of
where this particular rock had hit, but somewhere someone
picked it up, recognized what it was like a package in the mail
from another planet marked Moon instead of Idaho or New
Jersey, and brought it here to sit in this case so he and about a
million other kids could barely glance at it as they ducked into
the bathroom to pee.
He forgot for a minute Caleb’s suggestion about Mom
having a boyfriend and all the times that he had prayed for Dad
to be there in the morning when he woke up and he never was.
All he could think about was that when his dad bent over to touch
the ground, it was rocks like this that he was touching. Maybe his
dad had sent the rock himself like a postcard. He wanted badly
to hold it in his hands. That’s when he knew he was going to get
up in front of his class and tell the truth.
11 | Long Live Us
“Hello again, Darryl,” Mr. Mikan said. This time he had waited
for Darryl to come in last, after Caleb had briefly gone in and
come out. Caleb wasn’t probably in much trouble and he was
saving Darryl for last. Or more likely waiting for his mom to
get there. Adults were so petty sometimes, he thought. All that
waiting just to get me to feel bad. He thought kids who got into
trouble like this would usually cry and snivel and try to grovel for
the mercy of the grown-ups. But he wouldn’t do it, he decided.
He wouldn’t cry. He didn’t feel the least bit bad about smashing
that toad Jerry, and after all it wasn’t like they could tell his dad.
Caleb said once that the scariest thing about getting in trouble
was when his mom would say wait till your father gets home,
and even now that he was starting to accept that Dad was never
coming home, he had to admit that did sound scary.
“You want to tell me what happened?” Mr. Mikan asked.
Darryl knew he’d just heard the story twice from Jerry and Caleb,
so he wondered which parts of his story would match theirs. He
decided he didn’t care.
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Care to tell me why?”
Darryl thought about that. Mr. Mikan had a hint in his
voice when he spoke that suggested this was his last chance to
plead his case. Bite me, your honor, Darryl thought. “No.”
“Darryl, I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”
For the second time, Darryl felt distantly like Mr.
Mikan was being that reasonable, decent person that was
less disciplinarian and more just a benevolent older guy with
chronically-misbehaved grandchildren. It still didn’t matter.
What could he say? Jerry is like the biggest jerk in school. He tripped
me. I was just trying to do my speech that Mrs. Trudeau made me do
about my dad. My dad left us. Poor me. Whine, snivel, grovel, repeat.
No thanks.
“You know Jerry’s parents took pictures of his face and
his back. He was pretty banged up.”
Good, Darryl thought.
“They said they might press charges.”
“What does that even mean?” Darryl said, snarling as
best as he could manage. Why not? If he could beat some kid
up—not just any kid but Jerry McMillan—shouldn’t he act a
little tougher than he was?
“It means the police would come to your house and
maybe arrest you.”
Darryl hadn’t thought of that. They didn’t arrest kids, did
they? Suddenly he didn’t feel tough at all. He just wanted to go
home and get out of this brown-themed office with the big desk
and the cheap window blinds that looked like they hadn’t been
dusted in years.
That’s when Mom got there. He could hear her voice in
the hallway saying that Mrs. Greene had better point the way or
get out of the way and a moment later she poked her head into
Mr. Mikan’s office without knocking. She was still wearing her
scrubs from the hospital and hadn’t put on any makeup, which
meant she had come straight there. She didn’t roar like he thought
she might, but neither did she immediately forgive him. Instead
she gave him a long sad look, and he saw her for maybe the first
time as a tired lady with a hard job and a kid like him that was
always screwing things up for her, and he did cry after all.
“My dad’s an astronaut,” Darryl said. It always made him feel
nervous to talk in front of a group, and especially if everyone knew
him. There was something about the way people stared at you
when you were the focus of attention that was really unsettling.
Their expressions were flat and their eyes never wavered from his
face. It was sort of creepy to see the whole class looking at him
like that, and it broke his concentration for a second. He could
feel the silence stretch on uncomfortably.
“He...” Darryl started, but he had somehow forgotten
what was next. He winged it. “He’s an astronaut and he flew to
the moon when I was five on a special mission.”
“When you were five?” Jerry said. Mrs. Trudeau shot him
a look but didn’t shush him.
12 | Long Live Us
“Yeah,” Darryl said. “He’s still up there right now.”
Jerry made that sound that mean kids made when they
wanted to say Yeah right, but in a meaner way. It sounded like
Psht. Some of the other kids started to giggle.
Darryl looked down at the small white notecards in his
hands that were meant as a way to rescue himself if he got lost.
He flipped through them and read them word-for-word, talking
about mostly the moon and its fundamental properties and how
the moon’s gravity was uneven because of all the craters and
weak enough that if you weighed a hundred pounds on Earth
you’d only weigh sixteen pounds there. He got through all the
cards and went to sit down, but Mrs. Trudeau stopped him.
“What does your dad do there?” she asked. She said it
innocently enough, but she had a look on her face that suggested
she knew how embarrassing this all was for him, and that maybe
next time she was reading a book to the class he should shut his
mouth.
“Umm…” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” she said.
He shook his head.
“How do you even know he’s there?” Jerry said.
Darryl said the only thing he could say. “My mom told
me.”
More giggles, and Jerry laughed a little louder than
the rest, snickering behind his hand just soft enough that Mrs.
Trudeau looked but didn’t yell at him, and just loud enough for
everyone to hear. As Darryl sat down, Jerry leaned over and
whispered.
“My mom says your dad is a deadbeat.”
“Enough with the noise,” Mrs. Trudeau said, and Jerry
leaned back in his chair. Darryl thought then that he felt sick to
his stomach, and needed maybe to go see the nurse before he
threw up right there in front of the class. He was walking to Mrs.
Trudeau’s desk and as he walked by, Jerry’s foot shot out and
tripped him. Not enough to make him fall, but just enough so
he stumbled awkwardly and almost did. This time the rest of the
kids in the class laughed pretty loud. When he looked up, Jerry
gave him a nasty grin right back. The most innocent Who me?
look ever. That’s when Darryl decided to punch him right in his
stupid face.
It was a few days before the fight when he’d finally gotten up
the courage to ask Mom about Dad. Mom had been home for
half an hour or so, taken off her scrubs and put on sweatpants,
which usually signaled relaxation, and was reading her email at
the kitchen counter on her phone between stirs of the spaghetti
sauce that she was heating on the stove. She had gone away a
little. Zoned out, was how he thought of it, but he knew this
would probably be the best chance he’d get between now and
13 | Long Live Us
speech day.
“Mom?”
“Hmm…?” she said, not looking up from her phone.
She was typing something with the tip of her thumb on the little
touch screen.
“When is Dad coming home?”
“Hmm?” she said, her brow furrowing. She still didn’t look
up. He got the feeling he was pulling her away from something
she didn’t want to stop looking at. This is the same thing she did
sometimes when he tried to mention how that kid Jerry McMillan
sometimes did crappy things to him and he didn’t know what to
do. She was always either online talking to someone or going into
full momma-bear mode and trying to solve everything herself,
her way, which wasn’t ever what he really wanted.
“Remember when you said Dad went to the moon?
When’s he coming home?” he repeated. She gave the phone one
last glance and then tucked it into her pocket.
“Huh?” she said, clearly only just now processing the
question. He stood there patiently. It was tough to stand his
ground like that with Mom. So much easier to just walk away
and forget about it like he’d done a dozen times before. She saw
the look on his face. “Oh. I’m sorry honey, I didn’t hear you the
first time. Umm… You know, I’m not really sure when Dad’s
coming home. Why do you ask? Is someone bothering you?” She
looked nervous like he had asked the wrong question somehow.
He kind of knew he had. He wasn’t letting her off easy. She knew
the truth and he wanted it.
“Why don’t you know? Didn’t he say when he left?”
Mom looked at him for a long time and he watched the
stress that had fallen off of her face when she’d gotten home
slowly creep back in. It wasn’t promising. She bit her lip and
sighed a little, taking one of the kitchen chairs and pointing at
him that he should take one, too. He did, not liking what this
might mean.
“You know, honey,” she said, using her super-serious
voice, “you’re getting to be a really big boy now, and I think
you’re old enough that we can talk a little more like grown-ups,
right?”
When she referred to him as being a big boy, he felt smaller
than ever. But he nodded anyway, to keep her talking. Something
that sounded like it might be at least partly true was about to be
explained, even if it didn’t completely sound like good news.
“Your dad…” she began, and then stopped herself. What?
he wanted to yell, but he let her think about it. For an instant
she looked like she might tear up a little, or get that delicate
little bobbing throat thing that she did when she was trying not
to let her voice quiver if she was upset. She mastered it after
a moment, and gave him her biggest fake you-can’t-handle-thetruth smile, and said, “I’m sorry honey, I don’t know when your
dad’s coming home, but it won’t be for a very, very long time.”
14 | Long Live Us
He let her hug him, and then went to his room and tried to decide
if she was lying or not, or whether he wanted her to be or not.
This is what he was thinking about when he mashed
his right fist into Jerry McMillan’s nose and lips Wednesday
afternoon in class. Jerry that had stolen all of his pencils once
and broken them. Jerry that threw chewed gum or little wads
of chewed-up paper at his back from behind. Jerry that liked to
walk up in front of Darryl and cut a big fart right in front of him,
making everyone gag and run away. Jerry that picked on him a
hundred different ways, but worst of all Jerry that had told him
the truth. Your dad is a deadbeat.
When Jerry fell backward out of his molded desk chair,
the metal frame of it made a hollow donk sound on the tile floor,
and the only reason his head didn’t smack down too was because
he fell into Caleb’s leg. Caleb tried to scurry out of the way, but
Darryl was already on top of both of them. He stepped up and
pushed Jerry’s desk out of the way far enough to get a really
hard kick into Jerry’s side, after which Jerry made no immediate
sound because he couldn’t catch his breath. He was getting ready
to pull his foot back again, and this time aiming right at Jerry’s
head, when Mrs. Trudeau grabbed him from behind and his feet
left the floor.
He didn’t remember much about his drive home with Mom,
except the distinct feeling that nothing would ever be the same
again. Some things were permanent. You couldn’t un-hit. You
couldn’t un-kick. You were supposed to be sorry for doing it even
if you weren’t, but even if you were, no one would look at you
the same way as before.
When he got home, there were police cars in front of
their house. He looked at Mom and felt for the first time like
this whole thing might really be bigger trouble than even he had
imagined. He remembered Jerry’s mother and the look she had
given him as they left the principal’s office. Mom looked back at
him and tried to smile through a frown the way she always did
when something beyond her control was happening. He didn’t
see that look very often, and it was more than enough to make
that upset stomach feeling come back. They got out and three
men in uniform approached their car.
“Are you Mrs. Bradley?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Mom said. The man who spoke wore a
badge marked “Sheriff ” that matched the emblem on the door
of his patrol car. He turned and looked at Darryl.
“And you’re Darryl Bradley, correct?”
Darryl nodded.
“The same Darryl Bradley who hit and kicked Jerry
McMillan this afternoon?”
Darryl nodded again.
“Yes or no?”
15 | Long Live Us
“Yes,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
“All right,” the sheriff said, looking up gravely at Mom.
“May we come inside?”
“Sure,” she said, though she didn’t sound enthusiastic
about it.
When they were inside, Mom offered the sheriff and the
other two police officers some lemonade, which they refused.
She offered some to Darryl, who took it even though he was
pretty sure he’d barf if he tried to eat or drink anything right now.
The sheriff got a call on his radio through an earpiece so only
he could hear it. He clicked the button, leaned to one side as if
that would help him hear better, and then said, “Yep, we’re here,
hang on,” and left the room.
Mom and Darryl sat there at the kitchen table looking
at each other. Mom was still smiling and putting on her best
I’m-not-worried smile, but he could see through it. That’s the
thing about lies: once you catch a person lying once, you can see
it every time. He wondered if her boyfriend could see through
that smile. Had they known each other long enough for that?
Maybe if he ended up going away to jail or alternative school or
wherever it was that they took kids like him that punched and
kicked, Mom could have more time with him. He wondered if
she’d even be sad.
“Thank you, Sheriff,” a voice said in the hall, the owner
of which walked into view a moment later. He was a tall man in
a gray suit with a beige tie, and he looked like he might be about
the same age as Darryl’s grandfather. “I need to talk to them
alone, please,” he said to the other officers in the room, and they
left. The man in the gray suit put his briefcase on the table and
sat down in one of the chairs next to them.
“My name is Carl,” he said, offering his hand to Mom.
Mom shook it. He looked at Darryl and smiled, not offering to
shake. “And you must be Darryl.”
“Yes, all right?” Darryl blurted out. He hadn’t meant to do
it, it just came to him. “My name is Darryl Bradley. How hard
is that? You’re the third person today that’s asked me who I was
and you already know. I’m Darryl Bradley and I beat up Jerry
McMillan because he said something about my dad in school
today.”
“What did he say about your dad?”
Darryl gritted his teeth and looked at the floor. More of
the same.
“Darryl?” Carl asked. Darryl started to cry. He looked up
at Mom, who looked like she might cry, too.
“Whatever. I’m in trouble, I know,” Darryl said, doing his
best not to blubber the words.
“You’re not in trouble yet, Darryl. We can maybe keep
you out of trouble, in fact,” Carl said, “but I need to know what
Jerry said about your father.”
Darryl looked up at him. The guy in the gray suit, Carl
16 | Long Live Us
whatever, wanted Darryl to say the words. He looked at Mom,
who nodded.
“He said my dad was a deadbeat.”
Mom frowned then, and looked at Carl, who glanced
back at her.
“Is that exactly what he said?”
Darryl thought about it. The fists, the punching, the
kicking, the scratches, the anger.
“A-actually no. He said ‘My mom says your dad is a
deadbeat.’”
Carl glanced at Mom and gave a nod.
“What?” Darryl said.
Carl’s pocket started to vibrate and he reached into it and
retrieved his cellphone.
“Mmm-hmm…” he said. “Yes sir. I think we’re good.”
He paused, glanced at Mom and Darryl again while listening.
“I understand. Yes sir.” He hung up and turned around his
briefcase so the latches faced Darryl. “I want you to understand
something, Darryl. What you did today caused a lot of trouble.”
“I know,” Darryl whispered.
“Do you?”
Darryl nodded.
“Good, because we can’t ever have a repeat of this. Do
you understand?”
Darryl nodded again.
“Ever.”
“Okay.”
“Say it.”
“This will never happen again,” Darryl said, his chest
hitching a little.
Carl nodded and opened his briefcase. Inside was a small
computer screen. He turned it on and a message came up. Darryl
stared at it blankly for a few moments before realizing what it
was.
“Darryl, your dad is Colonel William Bradley and he is
most certainly not a deadbeat. He is currently part of a classified
lunar-based construction effort. Do you know what that means?”
“He’s building something on the…moon?”
Carl smiled. “Mmm-hmm.”
Darryl looked at his mom. A million questions came into
his head. Why didn’t you tell me? Can I write back to him? When is he
coming back? But only one came out of his mouth.
“Why hasn’t he written until now?”
Carl looked a bit ashamed of himself, which wasn’t what
Darryl expected a man like him to look like. “Because we told
him not to.”
“Why?”
“Look, it’s…” He was about to do that thing grown-ups
did where they stopped in the middle of an explanation because
they were afraid the kid they were talking to wasn’t smart enough
17 | Long Live Us
or strong enough for the truth. Carl went ahead though, and for
that Darryl felt grateful. “He was under orders not to use any of
the lander module’s power reserves to transmit anything other
than timed and coded mission reports. He disobeyed orders
when he sent this to you, but from what I’ve heard about what
happened today, there was no harm done. As long as no one
suspects he’s actually on the moon, then the secret is probably
safe.”
“How did he know?”
“That you were in a fight? He doesn’t yet. He knows
about Jerry though, and about what you’ve been going through,
because your mother has been emailing him every night. He can
receive messages on the lander, but he can’t send them. There
was a minor accident when they touched down on the moon
and the main solar panel was damaged. Every transmission on
his end uses up the lander’s battery power, and his orders are to
preserve that at all costs. Mission reports only, and only to us.
Plus, like I said, it’s top secret, and we can’t have people listening
in on conversations with astronauts that no one knows are up
there. Most importantly, though, his mission is a long one and he
might need that power on the trip home.”
He imagined his dad shaving in zero gravity in a space
capsule perched on thin legs that dug into the moon’s dark, silty
soil, listening to transmissions on the radio and getting messages
from Mom, but unable to talk back. Then the last part of what
Carl just said hit him.
“He’s coming home?” Darryl asked.
“See for yourself.”
Darryl looked back at the message for a minute,
memorizing every word, before Carl closed the case.
“Now that you know, your mom might let you type
something to him that he can read, but don’t expect a reply. And
no more talking about what your dad does for a living, okay?”
Darryl nodded soundlessly.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Later that night, after eating and brushing his teeth, he
realized he couldn’t remember what Mom had made him for
dinner. He couldn’t remember what day it was or if he had
homework that needed to be done. All he could do was stare out
his window at the dark night sky and repeat the words over and
over again. His father’s words.
Don’t be afraid. Bullies are just jerks. Stand tall. I’ll be home
soon. I love you.
18 | Long Live Us
Potluck
19 | Long Live Us
“You are a mighty woodsman,” Ashraf whispered.
“Shhh.”
Under the fence, the ass end of a bunny stuck up and out.
They crept closer. He couldn’t see whether it was in the snare or
just eating the violets. The rabbit saw them. It ran as far as the
snare would let it. It was a big one, as long as a cat but fatter.
“No way,” Ashraf said.
“I know.”
“There’s no fucking way that worked.”
“I know.”
They stood up and walked over to the fence. The rabbit
looked up at them and started to claw hard at the steel loop
around its neck. Both boys grimaced. Reese had Ashraf ’s cricket
bat in one hand.
“Dude,” Ashraf said. “You better…”
“I know, I know.”
Reese tried to think of shrink-wrapped chicken breasts
and pork chops. He was so hungry he felt a little nauseated, but
the critter at the end of his snare didn’t look all that anxious
to be eaten. He stepped as close as he dared to get. The bunny
stopped scratching and looked hard at him. He swung. The bat
didn’t come anywhere near the rabbit, but it rolled over in terror
anyway.
“Did you just take a practice swing? That’s cold, man.”
“Do you want to do it?”
Ashraf put up both hands.
“That’s what I thought.” Reese stepped closer this time.
He put one foot on the thin monofilament right behind where it
knotted. About ten inches farther down the cable, the rabbit was
pinned down, still and steady. He wondered suddenly if rabbits
had souls. “Is anyone watching?”
Ashraf looked around. The condos on the other side of
the alley were all impassive behind automatic sprinklers and cellpaper half-blinds. “Nah, you’re good.”
Reese tried to feel something. Sorry little guy. Sorry they
keep the fridge locked. Sorry I can’t get into Tufts if my BMI is over
twenty-two and a half. Sorry I couldn’t find anything better than a
cricket ba—
“You are a kung-fu master.”
“Shut up! I can’t do it if I’m laughing.”
Reese connected with the second swing and it wasn’t as
bad as he thought it would be. There was a little hollow tap at the
end of the bat and the rabbit lay still. He got down on one knee
and grabbed it around the neck. He gave it a good twist, and that
part was sort of gross. He lifted the warm, limp body into his
arms, and they stuffed it into the shopping bag they’d brought.
“That was some Grim Reaper shit right there,” Ashraf
said.
“Dude, all I know is I am so getting laid tonight.”
Ludivine offered to fellate Brandon for the container of mashed
potatoes before asking if they were fresh or instant. She regretted
her haste in this respect, but it appeared as if the Pyrex was nearly
full, and that much simple carbohydrate on offer was too much
to resist.
“All right,” he said.
“Where’d you get the key?”
“It wasn’t in the fridge.”
“Huh? Gross. I’m not blowing you for potatoes that’ve
been out all night.”
“They’re fine; they’re not made up yet.”
Instant it was, then. “Well, where’d you get the milk?”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t make ’em without either butter or milk, and I
know for a fact you don’t have butter in your house.”
“We do,” he said. “Right between the loaded guns and
the nuclear launch codes.”
“Look buddy,” Ludivine said, “this isn’t like a standing
invitation. If you want a hummer I want to see some goddamned
potatoes.”
“All right, ye of little faith. Just remember: no teeth.”
She bared them at him like fangs and hissed.
“Can you see if their light’s out yet?”
Ludivine peeked out the window. Brandon’s room was in
the attic above the garage. His father and stepmom were in the
main house doing taxes or yoga or whatever middle-aged people
did. The lamp in their second floor window winked out.
“I think we’re clear,” Ludivine said.
“All right, crack that window open a little and put this
under the door.” He handed her his junior varsity sweatshirt.
In the corner, a single-serving Euro-style electric coffeepot was
bringing the water to a boil.
“Nice teapot, Queen Elizabeth.”
“It was my mom’s from college.”
The water hit the flakes in the Pyrex and he started to
stir. They closed the window to just a crack. This was a family
neighborhood, after all, and anyone walking by could have
smelled it half a block away.
“You ready for this?” he asked.
Ludivine slobbered like a basset hound. Even with just
water in them, the smell of the potatoes mixing was like airborne
calories.
“Ta-daa!” He pulled out three packets of salad dressing.
Salad was one of the good foods. They were allowed to eat salad.
Sometimes even with dressing if it was a birthday or something.
He handed them to her.
“You sneaky bastard,” she said. The dressing packets
weren’t the kind with fake lipids. Better still, the sodium content
was low. Salt would make her puffy and being puffy would
20 | Long Live Us
make her mom ask questions. She’d been dating Brandon since
Memorial Day, and he was pretty standard boyfriend material,
but this was bend-over-backward territory. “How long did it take
you to get three of them?”
“I’ll never tell.”
This was way better than butter. It was Italian dressing.
There’d be basil and parsley, black pepper and oregano. “Are you
sure?” she asked.
“Only the best,” he said.
Head was head, but she wondered briefly if she hadn’t
gotten the better end of this whole deal.
“And the rabbit was all like, ‘Go ahead, make my day,’ and Reese
was like, ‘Be the ball, be the ball.’ Blam.” Ashraf swung the
cricket bat like an Indian Sammy Sosa swinging for the parking
lot. They were on the back stairs of Ashraf ’s older brother’s
apartment. Vamsi was in Mumbai for the rest of the month, and
Ashraf knew where he kept his key. The bat missed Stella’s head
by an inch or so.
Reese had pulled apart the rabbit, and the big pieces were
on the hibachi getting crispy. The rest of the carcass went into the
pot on the stove for stew. Ashraf had spent all afternoon looking
up rabbit stock recipes on the internet while Reese cleaned it and
butchered it in the sink. It’d looked easy on YouTube.
“And then he got down and was like, yee-aa!”
“Ugh,” Stella said, and did a little girl-shiver. Nalene
sighed loudly and looked around like she might’ve left something
important on a shelf and didn’t want to forget it when she left.
Ashraf had high hopes for Nalene, but at best he was just the
hook-up’s friend. He seemed to remember this suddenly.
“Shit was ninja. All I’m saying.”
“Did you get any pepper?”
“I did,” Ashraf said, in maybe his proudest moment of
the night.
They added it to the stew. It would take a while to simmer,
but they had time. Stella hadn’t said how the girls were able to get
away, but Reese and Ashraf were supposed to be at their evening
P90X with a sauna afterward, so they had a good two hours
before anyone would be looking for them. Plus it was Saturday
night. As long as they made weight, their parents didn’t care if
they went out and had a little fun.
“Reesey,” Stella said, “I’m so hungry my stomach hurts,
and Bugs Bunny smells fricking fantastic. Are we ready yet?”
Vamsi’s fridge and freezer were locked tight, but Stella had
violated the liquor cabinet almost immediately after arriving.
“Uh, not yet,” Reese said from the kitchen. The grill was
just to get them hungry; the soup would snatch the panties off
of them for sure. He diced in some carrots and mushrooms.
The only part of the grocery store he could get into without an
21 | Long Live Us
over-21 stamp on his ID was the produce aisle. His stomach hurt
too. “You can try if you want, but Wikipedia said rabbit’s a lot
tougher than chicken. If it’s not done, it won’t taste good.”
Stella sulked.
Ashraf was on his phone. “The good news is that it’s
supposedly leaner than beef or pork or chicken.”
Neither girl made a reply to this. Nalene sipped her vodka.
“The one we caught is technically called a ‘roaster’.”
Stella abruptly changed the subject. “Why is your baseball
bat flat like that? Is it for retarded kids?”
Ashraf did his best to look flabbergasted. He sputtered.
He looked behind his chair. He gaped. “It’s a cricket bat.”
They stared at him blankly.
“Crick. Et.”
“You just made that up,” Stella said.
“It’s for retards,” Nalene assured her.
Ashraf shook his head. “It’s the sec…” He looked at
Reese, who shrugged. “It’s the second-most popular sport in the
world.”
“No, reverse cowgirl is the second most popular sport in
the world,” Stella said. This made Nalene laugh, and they highfived. Nalene was pretty when she wasn’t trying to scowl herself
into a facial tic.
“Okay then,” Ashraf said. He leaned back in his chair
and put his hands behind his neck.
“Dude, you have the stale-est game I’ve ever seen,” Reese
said, which made them all laugh. Ashraf blushed like a heat
lamp, even under his dark cheeks. The four of them sat together
in the sweet crispy aroma of grilled rabbit and waited.
After about ten minutes, Ludivine let Brandon grab her boobs
and hold her by the hair or whatever else he wanted to do. For a
guy who made such a big deal about head, she didn’t understand
why it took him longer to come than regular sex. Sooner or later
something would click.
“That is… Oh, that is fantastic.”
She kept her eyes closed and tried not to listen to him
talking. His bedroom voice sounded like Mike Tyson and his
pillow talk got all prissy and weirdly elegant. He’d call her
“astounding” or “marvelous” like an old-timey magician. She
was afraid if she laughed she might sneeze, and if she sneezed
with his cock in her mouth she might injure him.
This is why she failed to hear it when his father opened
the door. Suddenly his dick was gone, and she opened her eyes.
“Whoa! Dad! Privacy!”
“Sorry.”
“Whoa!”
“Sorry.”
Brandon was on the door like a cheetah on a slow
22 | Long Live Us
springbok, and he slammed it so hard that his dad almost lost
some fingers.
“Sorry,” his dad said again, after a pause. He was standing
at the top of the stairs outside the door. “Hi Ludivine.”
“Hi, Mister Carew,” she replied, the top half of her head
in a stratus cloud of awkwardness.
“Are—are you eating in there?”
Brandon looked at Ludivine. She grimaced, trying to hide
the Pyrex. “Uhh… Not exactly.”
“Everybody dressed? I’m coming in.”
“Not yet,” Brandon said. He was pulling on his underwear
with one hand and trying to stuff his mother’s teapot under his
dirty clothes. The door opened. Brandon’s father sniffed the air.
“Brandon,” he said. No one had ever sounded that
disappointed. Ludivine buttoned the top of her shirt and stood
in front of the Pyrex. Brandon’s dad stepped past her and gave
her a shitty look. There wasn’t anything left in the bowl except
smears where they had scooped out the last little bits of it with
their fingers, but the entire room reeked of potatoes.
“Dad—” Brandon said.
His father held the Pyrex under Brandon’s nose like a
puppy who’d pooped in a shoe. “Really? Brandon, it smells like
a Boston Market in here. What am I supposed to say if Mrs.
Kincade asks me? ‘Oh, no, sorry Lucy, it must be your imagination?’
If a squirrel farts on the other side of the block, that woman
knows about it.”
Brandon bounced up off of his bed and closed the window.
“I’m sorry, I was just—”
“What? You were just what?”
“Hungry.”
“Hungry? For this? What about college, Brandon? Are
you hungry for that? Are you hungry for success? Your mother
and I have saved for y—”
“—years and years, I know.”
“Hey, don’t be a smartass, mister. Do you think this is
funny? Do you think type two diabetes is funny?”
“Dad, I get it, I get it.”
“No, you don’t ‘get it.’ This can shorten your life, Bran.
How’d you like to have your toes cut off because you can’t feel
them anymore? Christ, don’t they tell you about this stuff in
health class?”
Brandon said nothing.
“You’re five-eleven. If you weigh in at one-seventy even
once, they won’t let you take the ACT. If that happens,” he shook
his head, “your mother and I can’t help you.”
“I ate most of it,” Ludivine volunteered. She wasn’t sure
why she felt the need to protect Brandon, but he had warned her
his dad was heavy about college. She didn’t think he’d be this
heavy.
“I think you should go home, young lady.”
23 | Long Live Us
This was the dismissal she was waiting for. If there was a
God, he wouldn’t call her mom.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carew.”
“Maybe not now,” he said with a sigh. “But you will be
when you apply for medical insurance. Just…go. Just go.”
She went.
“So did you really kill our dinner?” Stella asked. She and Reese
were in Vamsi’s second bedroom. There was a faint dark-colored
grease stain on the pillow that must have been either from Reese’s
hands or Stella’s face.
“Look at this shit. What kind of total prick has raw silk
pillowcases? I hate this guy.” He looked over at the photo of
Vamsi and his girlfriend on the beach. Vamsi was carved out of
marble. “He probably likes the way erythritol tastes. I’m going to
wipe my dick on his hand towels.”
Stella reached over to the nightstand and took another sip
of her drink. She looked at him, expectantly.
“Okay, yes. Yes I did. I’m Davy Crockett. No: Jim Fucking
Bowie.”
“Daniel Boone,” she said. “Definitely someone with a
musket and a raccoon for a hat.” She kissed him.
“Ted Nugent.” He squeezed her ass hard like she liked it.
“That guy hunts bears with a crossbow.”
“Dick Cheney.”
He pulled away and pretended to be shocked.
“Oh right, I say ‘Daryl Gates’ and you say ‘Satan.’ Where
am I supposed to go with that?”
She giggled, and climbed on top of him. In the other room
Ashraf was halfway through The Very Best of Sarah McLachlan,
and he was asking Nalene for the fourth time if she was sure
she didn’t want another drink. As Stella eased herself down just
right, she tipped her head at the door.
Reese sighed. “Elmer Fudd.”
“He just tries too hard.”
“I know.”
She rocked against his hips and leaned back a little. He
kissed the inside of her wrist and tasted rabbit on her skin.
“Stella Safran,” the nurse called out. The woman was a nurse in
the sense that probably somewhere at some time she had seen the
inside of a hospital, but all they’d ever seen her do was weigh in
naked teenaged girls in paper shorts and gowns. Each piece of
paper clothing had its weight in ounces printed helpfully on the
front of it in large black letters. They were all seniors, and this
particular group were all past their eighteenth birthdays. They’d
done this every four months since kindergarten, but eighteen
meant there’d be no more second chances. No more moving
24 | Long Live Us
school districts or hush-hush trips to Fat Camp if their BMI went
over 22.5. These numbers would follow them forever. Ludivine’s
feet were bare on the tile.
Stella’s disposition, normally sunny and flirty, seemed to
flicker for a moment into darker territory. She stepped up onto the
scale and held very still. They could all hear the springs beneath
the scale’s deck creak a bit, and the needle bounced around her
weight before settling on a final number. There were a dozen
girls in line; upright collections of shoulder blades and hipbones
perched on knobby, coltish stilts. Stella had pretty hair, too.
“Thank you, Ms. Safran,” the nurse said, and Stella
stepped down. A cloud passed, and the sunshine came out again.
“Jesus, why so quiet?” she said through a smile, to no one
in particular. The rest of the girls laughed politely. She winked
at another girl that Ludivine didn’t know. The girl stepped
momentarily out of line to chat with Stella, and the two went to
the bathroom.
“Nalene Brightman.”
No one answered.
“Nalene Brightman?”
The girls stood huddled around a set of infrequently used
exam tables. Ludivine read in health class that girls used to get
their periods as young as eleven or twelve because of the estrogen
in the fatty-assed food they’d been allowed to eat. She cringed at
the thought of a roomful of crampy early-blossoming middleschoolers giving the real nurses hell day after day.
“Mary Lutz.”
No one bothered watching this time. Mary Lutz would
make weight. Mary Lutz always made weight. Mary Lutz was a
genetic freak of nature who never put on weight no matter what
she jammed in her mouth, and she ate so much protein that she
farted like a mountain lion in gym class when they were doing
core-strengthening. There was much eye-rolling in the papershirt crowd behind Mary Lutz’s back.
“Thank you Ms. Lutz, and well done as always. Ludivine
Riley.”
She stepped up. The scale was cold under her toes. A
faint breeze from the air conditioner made the fine hairs on her
arms stand up. She looked straight ahead and watched the spring
dial spin. She was five-three, which meant she could get away
with anything up to and including a hundred and twenty-seven
pounds, plus four ounces for her paper outfit. The needle hovered
around one-twenty. She prayed silently. It settled on one twentyone and a half.
“Thank you, Ms. Riley. Wait, here you are.”
She was Margined again. Fuck. The nurse handed her
a fact sheet and an exhaustive survey of her eating habits;
everything from “Do you eat for fun, or has a member of the
opposite sex ever pressured you to do so?” to “Have you ever
or are you currently gaining weight for the purposes of rapidly
25 | Long Live Us
expanding your breast size?” Her mom would get a copy along
with a detailed update on Ludivine’s health. This would be the
fourth in a row.
“It’s okay Lude-y. If you’re under, you’re under,” Mary
said, like an impala cheering on a Holstein heifer. If you’re under,
you’re under is what middle-aged women who’d had four kids told
themselves when they weighed in once a year at work. Girls who
were serious about college didn’t trigger Margin reports.
“Yeah, I need you to come to my house and tell that to my
mom,” Ludivine said. She walked back toward the waiting area
to get dressed and fill out her Margin survey. She took her clothes
into the bathroom and tossed the paper gown and shorts into the
trash. She caught a glimpse of her ass in the mirror and it looked
as miserably round and curvy as ever, like a basted Thanksgiving
turkey or one of those old Renaissance boudoir portraits by the
pervy Italian creepers who painted chubbies. A heaving sound
came from the stall on the end, followed by a flush.
“Nice, you guys,” she said. “Why don’t you just use a
goddamn stomach pump?” She turned to the stall and frowned
at it.
An eye peeked out from the crack along the edge of the
door. The latch bolt withdrew and Stella stepped out shielding
Nalene who was wiping her mouth with toilet paper. Stella
peered around the room and looked slightly sheepish, but that
smile was still there. She was taller than Ludivine and had longer
toes, which Ludivine was intensely jealous of. Longer toes hid
the puffiness of salt and fat and sweeteners better. Stella waved a
hand as if nothing important had ever happened in the history of
the whole world.
“Oh, she just ate something bad,” she said.
26 | Long Live Us
Nose Goblins
27 | Long Live Us
I open the door to a man in a space suit. Vickie is in the kitchen
and I can see her waving me off. She’s not wearing a bra. Ryder
is sitting in the denim beanbag chair playing Bejeweled on the
iPad. We’re on the second floor of a two-flat and the delivery
guy trails an oxygen hose down the stairs that connects to a port
on the side of his GardenPlus truck. It’s a pleasant green—the
truck, not the hose. He stands on the landing outside the door.
They never come in.
Vickie waits until she’s sure I don’t for some reason expect
her to help carry the bags without her bra on and then turns
back to the kitchen and starts putting away the open mail spread
across the table so we’ll have room to sort out the groceries.
“Good morning,” the delivery guy says, or something to
that effect. It isn’t easy to hear them through the Mylar head
bubbles. The positive pressure inside his suit is designed so that
any small tear results in air blowing out of the suit rather than in.
It makes him look like one of those inflatable bendy guys along
the road at used car dealerships. When the guy speaks it sounds
like he’s trying to talk through a beach ball.
“Just right here is fine,” I say, indicating the floor at the
top of the stairs. He puts down the first armload of bags and
clomps back downstairs to his truck. I pick up the bags and carry
them back through the apartment to the kitchen where Vickie
is standing and reading a five-month-old circular for afterschool
sports.
“Do you think he’d like tai chi?”
“Here,” I say, holding out the groceries. She stares at me.
I do not answer her question. I put the groceries on the floor at
her feet.
“So rude,” she says as I walk back to get the second load.
The best I can figure, Vickie grew up watching a little too much
TV, and she adopted the habit of talking under her breath just
loudly enough for me to hear her. It took me years to realize she
wasn’t actually talking to me when she does this.
“That everything?” I ask the guy. He nods with his entire
upper torso like the head of a papier-mâché dragon at Chinese
New Year. It looks like he’s forgotten something, but I’m not able
to look down at the grocery bags. He’s handing me a clipboard
and a pen to sign. I tip him. It’s rude not to tip them, Vickie says.
“You know what? Honey? We need to sit down and figure
this out,” Vickie says. She is serious. That Ryder cannot and will
not return to school for months is immaterial. It is imperative
that I recognize her concern.
“Just let me put the goddamned groceries down, will you?
Jesus.” I am rude sometimes.
She scowls. Ryder is standing in the doorway trying to
get his remote-control dune buggy to obey him. The batteries
are low. The buggy is reticent. He shifts his giant brown eyes
between the two of us, back and forth like the eyes of a Cheshire
cat clock. Vickie drops it. This round goes to me.
“Daddy, do you want to play Scrabble with me?”
I do not want to play Scrabble with Ryder. Ryder is five
and can neither read nor spell.
“Sure buddy, give me a minute.” I say this all the time,
and I’m starting to wonder if he translates it as the ‘no’ that it
is. He wanders back into his bedroom and builds a monster out
of the generic Legos that he for some reason likes more than the
real Legos.
A slam from behind me. I turn just in time to see Vickie’s
unwashed hair dangle in front of her cheeks and forehead. She
grips the edges of the granite countertop as if gauging how best
to tear it off of the island and hurl it at me. Her fingers curl. She
exhales. She is the Lou Ferrigno version of Bruce Banner. Vickie
mad. Vickie smash.
“What?” I ask. I already know.
“The coffee filters are the wrong size and they squished the
fucking bananas again.”
To tell the truth, GardenPlus has never been all that great at
delivering food, even before the MC. They bring us bags of
potato chips that are stuffed too hard into the cartons and the
Ruffles pour onto the floor in a crispy cascade when we put
them away. The apples and bananas invariably end up beneath
something heavy like glass jars of tomato sauce or salsa, and
they stare up ruefully at us from the bottom of the bags like
defeated prizefighters. Every can, and I mean without exception,
has a suspicious irregularity of some sort, sending Vickie (and
sometimes me, to be fair) sniffing the bent aluminum for hints of
botulism. They charge too much for the food and the receipt
is always a shitshow of surcharges. Fuel surcharge, delivery
surcharge, union surcharge, special state and city “goods” taxes;
it’s almost like they’re trying to impress on us—the merciless,
demanding customer—the sheer complexity of picking up bags
of food at one place and driving them to another. The costs! the
receipt screams. Do you see how they bleed us? They might as well
put their FICA taxes on there; there’s nothing we could do about
it. No one who lives with kids is going out there and coming back
without a full decon and a ten-day isolation.
Not everybody’s stuck inside, though, and I don’t let
Vickie forget it. There’s this whole movement of dads, usually
young ones, who decided to fall on their swords and live in tents
outside for the summer, or in their garages, so they could work
during the day and be quarantine-gofers for their families. Fuck it,
they insisted, my family is worth it, and it’s the sort of thing I can tell
my grandchildren about. These men put on a good face. They take
selfies sitting on campstools or grilling meat on hibachis and text
them to their children upstairs in the clean zones behind triple
deadbolts. They smile and wave silently. They Skype the bedtime
28 | Long Live Us
books. They start campfires in the alley behind the apartment
and sing songs or get into drunken fistfights or rounds of hugging
it out, bitch. It’s all very Bartertown and We Shall Overcome. They
thought in May that the outbreak would last a few weeks and be
over with. It’s now mid-August with no end in sight and Ryder’s
kindergarten registration has been postponed.
Vickie took one look at the Illinois FEMA warning that
came through after the first dozen grade-schoolers were stricken
and died and decided that none of us were leaving the house until
the MC went away. “Kids die,” she said simply, when I asked her
if a full quarantine was the right thing for us; for me. “Kids die.”
I protested that I only had three days left of my vacation time for
the year and it was iffy whether State Farm would let me take my
sick time for this. “Kids die,” she insisted.
“Tell that to my boss.”
“You don’t have a real job,” she says when I say this,
which is funny because the direct deposits I receive every payday
do feel fake. “You’re a secretary. Who cares?”
I’m an administrative assistant. “I’m going to be nothing
if I don’t show up for work,” I say.
“We’ll survive.”
“How? How the fuck are we supposed to survive without
my income?”
She rolls her eyes. My income covers my expenses but
little else: a car that I drive nowhere but work, the middle-quality
ties that the cheapest department store in our neighborhood
sells, and a monthly grocery budget big enough for organic,
individually-packaged milk but not beer. She’s a fourth grade
teacher with tenure and she had the entire summer off. She
doesn’t go back until Ryder does and her contract pays whether
the school is open or not. By the Fourth of July, I look down at
the three dads on my block who are camped out with tents in
their backyards and I feel the sharpest jealousy of my adult life.
I Google Help! My child is a cockblock. Ryder has slept on my
side of the bed for nine of the last nine nights. He is like a great
big sweaty man o’ war embargoing the shit out of my galleon’s
harbor. I Google sexiled. Vickie says nothing on this subject, other
than “Move over,” “Stop snoring,” and “What?” if I roll over
or make the tiniest noise at night. She never outright tells me to
leave, but neither does she make any effort to repel boarders in
the name of trade. She sleeps deeply, curled around him like a
tigress. I Google disparate parenting imperatives. I am an exile in
this tiny fiefdom, marginalized like a nocturnal gong farmer in a
blanket-chest shanty on the edge of the town proper. I am hale.
I revel in the sturdy firmness of the floor. I needn’t seek stealth
whilst I somnolently fart. I Google low back pain.
I wonder if things will ever be the same. He’s five years and
three months old, which means I have another approximately six
29 | Long Live Us
and three-quarters years until (if his old man is any yardstick) he is
bewilderingly ambushed by wet dreams, discovers masturbation,
and starts hunting some guaranteed night-time solitude. Then
will my early thirties be revenged. Then will I be the Claudius to
his Hamlet and sayeth things like “It smells weird in here,” and
“Have you washed those sheets lately?” for to subtly shame him. I
Google whether “revenged” can be pronounced with the Shakespearean
“-ed” suffix.
What will those years be for us? I wonder. Will Vickie
still love me? It’s hard to feel it these days, like a fire on the other
side of a heavy glass window. It occurs to me that I could sleep
on the floor anywhere. I Google typical prison sentences. I discover
that had I committed major corporate fraud the year Ryder was
born, I would’ve at least had a bed to sleep in for the ensuing
average of seven years and four months. I Google dark night of the
soul. What would our lives have been like without Ryder? Is there
an alternative universe somewhere where I’m the savvy, vital,
childless sex-God that I am for three and a half seconds each
morning when I wake up, before I realize where and remember
who I am? I Google quantum immortality.
I think of love as a resource rather than a construct. Like
water. Remember when we had all that love that one year? I
think. It was like love just fell out of the fucking sky. It’s been a
dry year for love in a half-decade of dry years; a love Recession
that nobody dares call a Depression. The newspapers assure me
that it’s all cyclical. These trends come around again, eventually.
I think of whores and I’m jealous that they’ve shed the need for
love. I remember reading that the prostitutes in Mexico pray to
tiny statues of the grim reaper. I Google Santa Muerta.
I am fat now, but Vickie is still beautiful even five years
after the Rydervasion. I Google gluten-free breakfast recipes. Vickie
says I should just go on Weight Watchers. I agree that it’s
probably a fine weight loss strategy. I nod my head. I drag my
feet. I do not download the app. I do not produce my credit card.
I remember my mother and her stout, boxy, impossibly uncool
friends at Weight Watchers weigh-ins. I realize my wife and I
have become those people. I would rather hang myself than go
on Weight Watchers. I am fine with obesity-related diseases. I
Google transabdominal gastrectomy and look at the before-andafter pictures like pornography.
I Google pornography. I remember reading Catherine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s rationale on why
pornography is a hateful objectification of women. I remember
vigorous sex. I remember sex in the mornings. I remember sex in
hotel rooms. I remember dirty sex on the floor in sweaty clothes.
I remember talking afterwards. I remember sleeping in nice
hotels. I remember eating at nice restaurants. I remember having
nice clothes. I remember going to the movies. I close the browser.
I open the browser. I Google meningococcal encephalitis.
30 | Long Live Us
We apologize for the continued delay in beginning our Fall term, the
letter begins. Along with tai chi, kindergarten has ‘terms’ now.
Or at least it was supposed to. It was in the handbook.
We have been advised by the Illinois headquarters of the Center for
Disease Control that Nancy Reagan Elementary’s ongoing cooperation
with state and federal quarantine guidelines, along with thousands of
other schools like us, has been instrumental in halting the spread of
meningitis in our community. We recognize the hardship that this season
has brought to the families of small children in our community—
Oh, do tell, middle-aged pencil-pusher whose children
are grown.
—and we want you to know that we’re here for you during this
apprehensive and difficult time. Our principal, Mr. Douglas, asked us to
pass on these helpful links with information on how to cope with longterm quarantine.
That Mister Douglas. He’s so helpful. The URLs are
long and complex, full of percentage symbols and a tilde where
Word decided to just truncate the rest of the page addresses. And
they’re on paper.
We’re sure you’re watching the CDC’s official statements with
great interest, but we want to reiterate here as a service to the community
that the current advisory for McHenry, Lake, and Cook Counties is that
all children under the age of eighteen should be confined to their homes
until the current crisis is completely exhausted. Children who live on
the second floor of apartments or above may open screened-in windows
for fresh air, but first-floor and basement apartments must keep their
windows closed at all times. All in-person contact with persons outside
the home is strongly cautioned against, as reports of infection with
negative outcomes continue to come in.
Which is a nice way to say, “Children continue to die
when inflammation strangles their spinal cords and bacteria eat
their brainstems alive.”
The CDC has also received reports of the so-called All
Clear movement disregarding the quarantine in a few particular
neighborhoods—
Why’s it gotta be a neighborhood thing, middle-aged
pencil-pusher?
—and we stand with the CDC’s recommendation. As such, we
can say definitively that our Fall term will not begin for at least another
month. We know this may come as a disappointment—
You know dick, Nancy Reagan Elementary.
—but we feel it is our duty to protect our community from this
unusually virulent strain of meningitis.
I finish reading the letter and hand it back to Vickie. She
frowns and eyeballs me, both of her eyebrows at full-staff. I am
supposed to say something here. She’s still being Icky Vickie.
“Did you see those guys across the alley?”
“Who?”
“The—” I point. “Those guys.” Our kitchen window
31 | Long Live Us
looks out at our downstairs neighbor’s backyard patio, and his
garage. The little gravel spot where I park my car is off to one
side and then behind that is an alley that’s more pothole than
pavement. On the other side of that, two doors west, is another
backyard. No one is there at the moment.
“Did they All Clear?”
I shrug. I’m pretty sure they did, but I’ve been married
to Icky Vickie for about three and a half thousand years and I
know the sorts of things she can do with my words if she’s in the
wrong mood. The other Vickie—Victoria, erudite and graceful—
is a ghost these days.
She stares out the window with her hands on her hips,
scowling at the house two doors down. Picture that look that
Superman gets when he’s trying to burn something with his eyes,
almost like a dog mid-fuck trying to really concentrate, superserious; that’s her. She’s laser fucking the house across the alley
with her scowl.
“That’s like, borderline child abuse.”
I nod my head, or I mean to, but instead my forehead
stays still and my chin sort of tilts to the side because my body is
big on truth and refuses to cooperate with my bullshit sometimes.
Everything is borderline child abuse. The time I forgot to pack
Ryder’s lunch in preschool and he had to eat the cafeteria food:
borderline child abuse. Letting him listen to Twisted Sister’s
“We’re Not Gonna Take It” on the way home from Bounce
House Deluxe: borderline child abuse. The time Ryder stepped
in a puddle on the way to school and the one leg of his jeans was
damp around the ankle for what must have been two or three
whole hours; that wasn’t even borderline, that was clearly child
abuse.
Ryder comes in. He’s got a Twizzler between his teeth
and he’s bitten off both ends so he can use it as a straw.
“Can I have some milk?”
“Sure buddy,” I say. I wait patiently while Vickie tries
unsuccessfully to psychokinetically incinerate the house across
the alley. It is several minutes later before I remember to get the
milk for Ryder (borderline child abuse!), and by then I want a
Twizzler, too.
“Whatcha watchin’?” I ask. It’s fucking Caillou. It’s
always Caillou. I know this before I ask; I just want to get his
attention.
“Caillou.”
“Can you pause it for a second?”
“No.”
“Come on, dude, pause it.”
Ryder brings me the remote. I pause it.
“What, Daddy?”
“Two things. No, wait… Three things.”
“What?”
“I want one of those Twizzlers.”
32 | Long Live Us
“They’re in the pantry.”
“Got it. That was number one.”
“What’s number two?”
“I’ve got a song you should hear. It’s called ‘Walk Like an
Egyptian.’”
“No, Daddy. Listen, Daddy, I want to watch my shows.”
“It’s a really fun song.”
“No.”
“All right.”
“You said three things.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah.”
I fake a confused look. He is just at arm’s length. I grab
him rattlesnake-fast like he likes it and tickle the shit out of his
ribs. He explodes in laughter.
“Bya-ha-ha, Daddy, staaaahp!”
I stop. I get a Twizzler and a small glass of milk for
myself. We watch Caillou. His grandmother, the delightful old
bitch, insists on calling him “kai-YOOOO.”
“Does it taste like strawberry?” I ask him.
“Kinda,” he says, sipping. He tries it several times and
can’t make up his mind. I try it, and I can’t make up mine, either.
The first and best rule of being a quarantined parent is you do
not talk about it—not about the quarantine, not about the men
camping outside, and certainly not about parenthood itself.
There are no good places a conversation like that can go. For
every excuse I have about why I should be out there with the
other dads, Vickie has a story of a guy who discovers after a life
spent thinking he hates children that parenthood is some sort of
extra wing of his life that was under construction until that day
at the hospital. Where to go with that, except the truth? For every
guy who loves being a dad, there’s another who realizes too late
that he’s created something his wife loves more than him.
“Do you want some of this?” Vickie asks. She indicates
the final four spoonfuls of the batch of macaroni and cheese that
she and Ryder just ate. Vickie isn’t sold on this whole gluten free
thing that I’m doing. It’s been months since so much as a crouton
has passed my lips, but a guy can only eat so many eggs and so
much plain white rice. I’m halfway to the pan before I turn back.
I drink a glass of tap water instead. It never comes out of the tap
cold enough.
I get a text. My State Farm franchise office manager is
big on texting. Need to talk. May re-categorize your position
as contractor so we can get someone else in the interim. Please
call when u get a chance.
“See?” I say, holding the phone under Vickie’s nose. I’ve
been waiting for this shoe to drop all summer, if only to rub in
the correctness of my prediction.
33 | Long Live Us
She frowns. “They should have done you a favor and fired
you. At least you could have applied for unemployment.”
I want to yell, but I’m stopped by a twist of shame in my
stomach so sharp that I feel momentarily like I might throw up.
I sit at the kitchen table and put my face in my hands, stilling the
urge to fling open the window next to me and jump out of it.
“Vick, what the hell are we going to do?”
“You’re being dramatic. We’ll be fine. We’ve got each
other.”
Do all people who don’t belong together in the first place
say that same thing? We’ve got each other? Maybe we had each
other once—in fact I know we did, because I have pictures—
but now? I do not say this. I do not say anything. The fact that
I do not say anything angers Vickie. She looks at me until the
“Well?” leaves her expression. She gives me the stink eye. She
starts doing angry-dishes, slamming the bowls together loudly,
cramming the pots into the cupboard without even looking to
see if they’re stacked, and tossing the silverware into the drawer
without sorting them. I hate it when she does this.
“Oh my God,” Vickie says. She says it loudly from the kitchen.
She is on the phone. Ryder and I are playing Canasta with all of
our cards up so I can lose on purpose every time. He gets mad
when I win. I am not immediately alarmed by Vickie’s tone. She
will often talk to her older brother Noah and say “Oh my God”
in this weirdly loud and serious-sounding voice. It could mean
someone was horrifically disfigured in a house fire. It could
mean someone has gotten divorced. It could mean someone’s
whitefish was not taken off of the check when it was delivered
undercooked. It could mean she just remembered loaning an
unreturned book to someone years ago. “Oh my God,” loudly, is
Vickie’s Swiss-Army version of “Wow.”
Ryder makes his move. I never see it coming.
“Haha, Daddy! I win!”
“Awww, man,” I whine.
“Really?” Vickie says, loudly. Really, the busload of nuns
was killed by an IED? Really, the bank foreclosed on Marianne
Phelps’ house before she was able to get the second mortgage
stripped? Really, they’re selling Go-Gurts in ten packs now?
“Want to play again?”
“Yes.”
“Can I win this time?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that boring, though?”
“No.”
“I’ve got to win sometimes.”
“Never!”
34 | Long Live Us
“All right,” Vickie says. “Well, let me know.” Let me know
if you hear anything else about the extinction-level asteroid about
to strike the Earth. Let me know if the poor woman’s children
need a place to stay; our means are limited, but our hearts are big.
Let me know if I can help you gang up on Leslie Hauerbach, that
bitch. Let me know if I can send you that recipe for Minnesota
Sushi.
“Who goes first?”
“I go first.”
“Okay. No cheating this time.”
“I won’t, Daddy.”
“I got my eye on you.”
He smiles.
Vickie does not smile. Vickie walks into the room with
tears in her eyes.
“What’s going on, babe?” I ask.
“I just got off the phone with Dana.” I don’t need my
mental Rolodex for this name. Dana is Kip’s mom. “Kip
apparently got the MC.” She is crying hard now.
“Mommy, what’s the matter?”
I look at her. She shakes her head.
Kip haunts us. There are times when Vickie wants to talk only
about one thing, and when those times come, the smart move
is to go ahead and let her. She wants to talk about Kip. Kip was
five, like Ryder, and his dad All Clear-ed them last week when
the CDC numbers came out. Kip is dead.
“She said it’s not like on the internet. She said it looked
like a cold.” It’s 1:46 a.m., and Vickie and Ryder share the bed.
I am sleeping on the floor between the bed and the closet; or
rather, I was sleeping. “That can’t be right, can it?”
“I hope not,” I say. That meningococcal encephalitis
would resemble a common cold in any way is the most dubious
thing I’ve heard about it in a vast ocean of dubious things, but
my job here is not to problematize this moment for Vickie. She
wants this moment; wants it to be what she thinks it is.
“So scary,” she says.
So stupid, I think. The CDC reports that they post online are
long, impenetrable tracts of scientific verbiage that I’m guessing
almost no one reads in their entirety, but I read most of the last
batch. After my eyes started glazing over in the methodology
section, I remember catching a short passage when I skipped
to the conclusion that seemed to suggest people were confusing
other diseases with the MC. Migraines were an obvious one, but
other stuff, too: strokes, even pneumonia.
“He’s not going to get it,” I say. “We’ll be fine. We’ve been
cooped up in this fucking house for months. We couldn’t even
catch pink eye if we wanted to.”
“Pink eye comes from not washing your hands after you
35 | Long Live Us
go to the bathroom and then touching your eyes.” This is Wiki
Vickie, who needs to be right about everything.
I consider all the times I’ve failed to wash my hands. Her
explanation feels improbable. I offer no further resistance. I wish
she would go to sleep. “It’s going to be all right, sweetheart.”
“Don’t dismiss me like that.”
“What?” I ask. I know exactly what she means. Wolf ’s
Den, this is Lone Wolf. I’ve picked up a bogie. Pretending to
be too tired to follow the conversation is my last-ditch evasive
maneuver; she is a heat-seeking missile. A groggy “What?” is my
barrel roll.
“I’m worried about this family,” she says. She is sitting
up. Get out of there, Lone Wolf. We have radar lock. Solid tone.
“I am too, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to give you the
impression—”
“Oh fuck you, Tim. Just roll over and go to sleep, then.”
The air is hot with her anger; she grinds it with a sigh like
a millstone.
Mayday, mayday. I reach for the eject handle and I
remember that this is a metaphor, and there isn’t one. “I forgot to put the dishes away,” Vickie says.
“Really?” I am not asking if she is correct, I am asking if
doing the dishes is necessarily a priority when this is the first time
in almost two weeks that we have our bed to ourselves. Ryder
spent the last forty minutes before bedtime sprinting from our
kitchen to the closet nook at the front of our unit. He collapsed
sweaty and silent shortly thereafter.
“It’ll just take a minute.”
“I can do them,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
I do the dishes quietly, using my fingers as buffers for
the plates as I slip them soundlessly into the bottom rack of the
washer. I am a crockery ninja. The operation takes exactly seven
and one-half minutes and when I return Vickie is rolled onto one
side, snoring lightly. I am not giving up that easily. I slide up to
her and try to snuggle.
She snorts awake. “Huh?”
“Nothing, I just…” I rest my hand on her belly.
She disguises a sigh with a yawn. “Sorry, honey, I’m just
tired. I did like four loads of laundry today.”
She is not saying this because I could possibly have
forgotten; she has reminded me twice already in the past four
hours. I should have seen it coming. I gently remove my hand
and roll over to my side.
There is one thing I can do that bugs the shit out of her,
and I do this now. I remain awake enough that my breathing
never settles into the deeper, calmer breaths that mean sleep. I
am instead utterly silent. Vickie abhors silence.
36 | Long Live Us
She lets me do this for a while, and just as I’m about to fall
asleep for real, she sighs heavily and says, “We can do it if you
want to.”
I do want to, but this is a trap. Quickie Vickie is like
the Checks Cashed Here of our marriage. Some ports are best
avoided, even in a storm.
“Nah, that’s okay,” I say. I’d like to thank the Academy. “I
know you’re tired.”
Goodnight moon. Goodnight old saggy mattress.
Goodnight disappointment. Goodnight thwarted boner that
takes forever to go away. Good night Cheez-Its crumbs under my
pillow for some reason. Goodnight woman whispering I did like
four loads of laundry today.
“Mommy!” Ryder wails.
We are both awake instantly, but it’s Vickie who’s up and
moving. I hover in near-sleep like a sonar operator listening for
the second ping that will indicate a torpedo in the water. Vickie
hits the lights but all is quiet. Just a nightmare.
“Tim,” she says softly.
I suspect that she wants me to sleep on the couch. I pull
on my underpants near the foot of the bed and grab my pillow.
“Tim,” she says. This time it’s loud.
I shuffle into Ryder’s room. There’s something on his
face.
“What?” I ask.
“What do you mean, what?” Vickie says.
I blink. Ryder’s face, shirt, and bed are covered in blood.
“I don’t feel good, Daddy,” he says.
“Holy shit,” I say.
“Get the thing, Tim,” she hisses. This is what she does
when she’s trying not to let on that she’s scared about something
in front of Ryder. It might upset him, she argues.
More than bleeding all over himself ? I ask my internalized
Vickie. Our counselor says that when we argue with imaginary
versions of each other when we’re not actually communicating,
it’s called “conflict-maintaining dialogue.” I am moving too fast
to think about what this means. I get the thing.
I am terrified of the thing. The thing is a transdermal
patch that looks like a Band-Aid and can detect MC in ninety
seconds with only a five percent margin of error. The thing was
$150 and its only purpose is to tell us if Ryder is about to die.
“What is that?” Ryder asks.
“It’s just like a Band-Aid, buddy. It’ll help with your
nose.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I know, Rydie. Just help me out here.”
He starts to cry a little. The edges of the thing won’t stick
down. The instant it touches his skin it starts to turn blue.
37 | Long Live Us
“What does that mean?” I ask, not looking up. Vickie
doesn’t answer. Vickie never fucking answers when I need her to
answer.
Ryder sneezes. I look down. Droplets of his blood coat
my chest hair. It looks black in the light from the hallway. I put
my hand on them and they smear.
“Oh, God,” I say.
“Jesus, Tim, will you hold it together?” This is Vickie, not
in my head.
“I’m working on it,” I say.
“Work harder,” she says.
“What does it mean when it’s blue?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh?” She fucking knows. She’s the one who made me
buy the damned thing. I stand up and walk to the bathroom for
the thing’s box. I pick it up. I catch a glimpse of myself in the
mirror and I’ve got a bloody handprint in the center of my chest.
I turn on the water instinctively.
Ryder sneezes again, harder this time. “Oooowww,” he
says. I do not know what hurts. I wonder if it will get worse. I
wonder if he will look at me with those huge eyes when it hurts
too much to talk anymore, like they say on the internet usually
happens. I wonder if watching that will make me want to die.
“What are you doing?” Vickie says from the other room.
Fuck you, Icky Vickie, I think. I take a breath like a juggler
who works a live baby into the air between twirling fire-axes and
chainsaws. I look down.
Blue = normal.
“Oh,” I hear Ryder say, in a different, suddenly less-scared
tone. “There it is.”
I stand in the doorway. Ryder is on his bed and he’s just
picked something up from the gore between his knees. It’s a
Lego, one of the little ones.
“Where was that?” I ask. No one says anything.
“Will you get me a washcloth, please?” Vickie says. Her
sleep shirt is covered in little spots of blood where she dabbed at
his face with it, and she’s helping Ryder pinch his nose shut. I
get the washcloth for her and sit on the carpet outside the room
while the shakes wear off. Vickie looks at me and shakes her
head, but she doesn’t say anything else.
The day after the Lego death scare is September 11th. It’s not
the kind of day you can celebrate anything on, ever, and most
of us who remember that day try to forget that it ever happened.
The fucking DJs on Spotify still think it’s appropriate to play
“Superman” by Ben Folds Five and that idiotic Enya song, and
that makes it hard to forget. When Ryder is in school later in the
year, after the CDC finally begins letting people out neighborhood
by neighborhood starting in November, I will think to myself that
38 | Long Live Us
that was the time I could have signed myself up for something
different in this life, the last time I ever really had a choice about
any of this. But that isn’t true.
The day after Ryder sneezed out a brick from set 7206
(Fire Helicopter), Vickie gets up before both of us and makes
us toast with butter and sausages. Ryder and I sit down and eat.
Vickie doesn’t yell at us when we leave the plates on the table, and
when I come back later to do the dishes, she doesn’t rearrange
the top rack like she usually does before I put the soap in. We
stand for a moment in our kitchen and she puts her head on my
right shoulder blade. She reaches through my armpits and curls
her arms around my shoulders, rubbing her chin back and forth
against the fabric of my t-shirt. I stop doing what I’m doing and
my hands reach behind me for her waist.
We look out the window. She says the house across the
alley has definitely All Cleared, and I agree, and I say it’s totally
irresponsible. “Kids die,” I say. I shake my head.
“You could go out there, if you wanted,” she says, softly.
The alley dads don’t look as haggard yet as they will in late
October, but they’re getting there. “We’d be okay in here if you
wanted to get out. I know you do.”
I frown-smile, and I hug her. “That’s nice of you to say,
baby, but no. I think I’ll stay here.”
“Really,” she says. She is sincere, and it comes with a
delivery confirmation. I get the message. I sign the slip.
“I know, baby. I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
39 | Long Live Us
The Tree Over
Garret’s Hole
40 | Long Live Us
“That fuckin’ tree is gettin’ too big.”
“Yep.”
It were. It were getting too big. And if it weren’t for the
fact that Abraham had fifty-four payments left on that house of
his, he’d have just called up Dan Farnum from over in town and
had him make him an offer. Dan was a limp little bastard, but
everybody said he always got shit sold when shit needed sellin’.
“The damn shadow’s so long that my fields ain’t gettin’
any light in the afternoons.”
“Mine neither.”
Nester liked to talk the same way goats liked to shit, which
is to say awful frequent. Abraham didn’t mind talking to him
cause they shared a fence on the back of their respective farms,
but if you’da given him half a chance old Abe mighta spent the
remainder of his long-assed life communicatin’ with grunts and
hand signals.
That Fuckin’ Tree stood over them by what Abe figgered
musta been a good four hundred feet.
It weren’t no four hundred feet tall.
Goddamn it, Soobie, shut up when smarter folks is
talkin’. It had arms real long like, the kind with a jillion branches
and littler branches and twigs and so forth. Great big leaves that
seemed to just suck on the sun. It was getting too big, and of all
the numbnuts in the township of Garret’s Hole, at least Abe and
Nester were men enough to say it outright.
Anyway, the tree was tall enough that at one point or
another durin’ the day just about every square inch of Garret’s
Hole was standing in its shadow. Which was...watcher call it...
problematic for those inclined to make their livin’ by farmin’
it. Now allowin’ that most people don’t really understand the
fineries of growin’ things, it follows at least in a simple way that
not gettin’ enough sun during the late afternoons weren’t no good
for nobody, and especially those with stuff in and growing. Stub
Sixbury over on Route 4 even came in.
“Do you know, Abraham,” Stub began one morning,
“t’other day I was coming in from milking and I looked up
and that fuckin’ tree was castin’ a shadow all the way onto the
southwest corner of my corn?” Stub’s farm was half a mile
outside of town and that’s how I figgered on four hundred feet,
Soobie, ya fucking know-it-all.
Abraham picked a piece of scrambled egg outta his beard
and told May’s daughter Julie to get him a little more coffee.
They was sittin’ around a table at May’s on Sunday mornin’
while alla their women was at Church.
Only time a man can think straight.
Jesus, Soob, either let me tell my story or go to Church
with ’em next time. Anyways, May’s weren’t usually as much a
place for thinkin’ as it were for hidin’ out and eatin’ extra bacon
in the company of a bunch of half-couth, bullshittin’ old men.
These old bastards wouldn’t agree to it if you suggested it, but
they lived their very lives for gossip and hearsay. Mostly they just
listen, eat their English muffins and give May’s girl a hard time
about the coffee; but once in while, though, one of ’em would get
somethin’ in their head, and it would spread through the whole
town at the speed of horseshit. It weren’t, like I says, usually
Abraham that did the spreadin’, on account of him not likin’
much to talk, but old Abe were a ponderer at times, even he’d
admit.
“That tree needs to come down.”
“Pssht. How you figgerin’ on doin’ that, Abe?”
“I didn’t say how, Nester, I just says it needs to come
down.”
“Well that’s what I’m sayin’ too,” Stub agreed. He stands
up and his napkin falls off of his lap but he don’t bend over to get
it. “I’m gonna go head over there this afternoon with my saw and
bring ’er down.”
“You ever drop a tree that big before?” Abraham asked.
“Nope. They’s always a first time for everything.”
“Just don’t bring it down on nobody.”
“Thanks for the advice, Abe.”
“I’m just sayin’ is all.”
“I know you are. It ain’t my first big one. You rest assured.”
Well, turns out Stub just had a little ol’ Stihl electric
chainsaw that wasn’t about to cut down no anything. Half an
hour fartin’ around with the bark on that big bastard of a tree
barely even left a scratch and he ended up burning out his little
baby hedge trimmer and slinkin’ back to the diner smellin’ like
sweat and electrical fire. Abe didn’t tease him none—didn’t see
the need to, really—but it were clear that Stub had tried his best
and failed.
“I’m gonna ask Jimmy if I can borrow a Husqvarna,”
Stub threatened, still all grouchy, though by now nobody paid
much attention to him.
Nester was the next to try, though it were a week later
when he finally got out there to do it. He did have a Husqvarna
(a real chainsaw; gas powered, five and a half foot bar, tungstenedged teeth, and a big ol’ hairy pair of danglin’ balls to go with
’er) and by the look of him Jimmy Shaw had sold Nester on all
the accessories includin’ a shoulder strap and a clear plexiglass
mask that wrapped around the bill of his old baseball cap. Jim
Shaw ran the SGE store on Route 4 between Garret’s Hole
and Badger Lake, and he’d had the same ten chainsaws on the
wall for damn near the whole time he’d had the store open. He
did a brisk business in four wheelers and snowmobiles around
Christmastime, but them chainsaws was mostly for the real deal
and there ain’t been a logging outfit in Garret’s Hole since Jimmy
ran the store for his dad when he was a teenager.
Somehow, though—and Abe never got around to askin’
how—Nester’d gone in there, walked straight up to the biggest,
Chainsaw-Massacrin-est, sunovabitchin’ chainsaw in the whole
41 | Long Live Us
shop and told Jimmy to sell it to him. And really he could barely
even hold the thing. He had to put ’er on the ground and set one
foot on the handle to hold ’er steady while he gave the pull-cord
a rip. Now nobody dared say much when the first three pulls
didn’t do nothin’, because aside from not bein’ able to turn over
a chainsaw motor bein’ the sort of thing Stub woulda normally
given any man shit about, they was mostly just concerned that
Nester’d drop the damn saw and chop himself up.
Well that didn’t happen, thankfully, but when that saw
finally turned over you’d a thought he was hand-startin’ a jet
engine. Everybody cleared back about fifteen or twenty feet at
first to watch him make the first cut, and then further when he
revved it up and it coughed out a little smoke. The blade bit
pretty good the first time and the folks watchin’ all tried to figger
on which side it would come down so they could be somewheres
else. This wasn’t no little tree, you understand. This was a big
fucker. The tree was maybe four times thicker than the blade of
the saw was long. We’re talkin’ thick as a room, or damn near
that thick if you can picture it. He had one crease pretty much all
the way across and a few feet deep but when he went in for the
second cut, though, at a higher angle, it was tougher going.
Nester was ready for it, though, to his credit. He backed
out the blade and checked the teeth, which were fine, and put
a little extra oil on the chain to keep it smooth and moving. He
went in for another try and it weren’t five seconds into that next
cut that the saw hit a knot and that chain come flyin’ off. Some
of the folks standing nearby was ready for it and they ducked but
it hit old Nester square in the face and knocked him flat.
“Holee shit!” somebody hollered, maybe Stub, but these
days nobody remembers if he was even there.
I saw him there, it was him.
S’that so?
Mmm-hmm.
Soob, you weren’t even outta fuckin’ overalls when this
happened.
I swear to God.
You talk more horseshit… Abraham walked over to
Nester and stood over him expectin’ to see half his face gone.
Instead Nester just blinked up at him from behind that sissy mask
that Jimmy’d sold him. It had a great big scratch across the front
of it, but Nester was fine. ’Course, you wouldn’t exactly see ’em
hangin’ in the garage, but after that day Jimmy sold quite a few
more of them safety masks.
They got Nester up and the saw was stuck dead nuts in
that fuckin’ tree. Jimmy came by later with another saw, intendin’
to try and help Nester cut it out, but after taking a look at what
the tree done to that big-ass Husqvarna, Jimmy remembered
he had somewhere else to be. Nester decided to cut his losses
and leave the damn thing right where it was with the handle and
motor stickin’ out.
42 | Long Live Us
And there it stayed for another month maybe—or six
weeks, who even knows?—before Abe started measurin’ his
corn and realized it weren’t growin’ right because of the tree. By
then—and Soobie, you shut the hell up, I’m tellin’ a story here;
I know you ain’t said nothing yet, but you was goin’ to and I’m
sayin’ shut up—by then that tree was six hundred feet tall if it
were an inch, and it cast a shadow in the afternoons so big that
it was like the sunset. Fields that used to get plenty of light were
gloomy for a good bit of the day. Wasn’t no good for them ears
Abe was trying to grow, and it pissed the man off in a way I ain’t
ever seen him.
Old Abe was frownin’ at his grits one mornin’ and in
comes Stub and Nester lookin’ for coffee and eggs. Usually they
was both pretty talkative, but lately on the subject of the tree
neither one of them guys said shit to Abe if they had a mouthful.
“How you been, Abe? How’s Jenny?” one of ’em says,
but Abe was real quiet, and mean-lookin’. Stub and Nestor didn’t
push, and that day was the quietest May’s has ever been for
breakfast. I can’t say for sure now, of course, but to my mind that
was when Abraham decided that enough was just about enough.
He up and left the diner and was next seen marchin’ across the
highway into the big field next to the water tower carryin’ his axe.
It weren’t as though Abe was the only one in town with a
bitch about the tree, neither. Half of them guys that followed him
down and took turns with the axes had fields that the tree was
throwin’ too much shadow on. Abe was a tough old bastard, but
there was enough elbow grease to go around’s what I’m sayin’.
Steve Bishop and Ed Brown’s kid and Rocky Sixbury were there
for sure. You remember Rocky with the big ol’ tattoo on his arm?
That sunovabitch could swing a wood axe like you wouldn’t
believe. Anyways, they all pitched in for a whole day. Back and
forth. Chop and chop. Swing and swing. Little bits of that tree
come off and they were standin’ in a pile of cuttings before long,
but I’m tellin’ you that tree was just… It wasn’t like anything you
ever saw. A whole day and they made about as much headway
on it as Nester’d done with that Husqvarna. Enough to see the
metal bite the wood, but not much more. The bastard was just
full of knots beneath the bark, and pretty soon the boys were
takin’ turns choppin’ while the others were sharpenin’ the axes.
It got so that every eighth or tenth swing they’d pull out a dull
blade and then—hell—you might as well have been tryin’ to cut
it down with a pair of butter knives.
So they get to the afternoon like this and can’t none of ’em
just about lift their arms anymore. Now it might’ve just ended
there, it really mighta, except along comes Abe’s granddaughter
Jenny and brings him some doughnuts and a pitcher of ice tea.
Abe’s a proud fella, you understand, and he weren’t for one
second about to let Jenny see him get beat by no tree, so he jumps
up again and starts hackin’. And Jenny sits there and watches
for a while, encouragin’ him. But like I says, Abe might as well
43 | Long Live Us
have been tryin’ to cut that tree down with a Buck knife for all
the good it was doin’. Little pieces of bark came off, sure, and a
little bit of the heart wood, but nothin’ that was ever much of a
real threat to that tree.
You can see where this is headed. Some of you are old
enough to remember Abe and what happened to him, but this
was the moment. He starts to swing a little slower, and a little
slower, and then finally he just swings a few times with his right
hand because his left arm’s danglin’ at his side. None of the other
dumb bastards with him knew what that meant, but hindsight is
thirty-thirty as they say, and Abe was havin’ him a heart attack.
They said later that when he finally keeled over he was probably
dead ’fore he hit the ground. Jenny was beside herself and cryin’
and tryin’ to get somebody to run to the farm down the road and
use the phone to call the ambulance, but here’s Nester standin’
there lookin’ at him sayin’ “He don’t look good, Jenny, he don’t”
over and over.
Stub Sixbury and Abe’d been friends for as long as either
of them or anybody else could remember, but it’s fairly certain
that Stub had planned what he did next ahead of time. He walked
a little ways down the road to his pickup and back, carryin’ two
ten-gallon cans of gas. While Jenny and Nester were frettin’ over
Abe, Stub walks up to the fuckin’ tree and starts pourin’ the gas
on it. Jenny screeched a little about it, but they picked up Abe
and moved him away and Stub waited for everyone to get clear
before he took out his matches.
“You think that’s a good idea, Uncle Sal?” Rocky hollered.
“I ain’t got any others,” Stub said, and flicked a kitchen
match at the tree.
It weren’t like the movies, but the gas did catch on pretty
fast and burn hot, and Stub hauled ass back out of the way as
far as he could. The fire reached up the side of that trunk pretty
good for a while and you could hear the bark sizzlin’ and smell it.
Even still, it weren’t like no movie. It didn’t just catch and burn.
We all stood there watchin’ (except for Jenny). Now I never saw
one of them guys—in church, I mean—that wasn’t there for a
funeral or a wedding, but we was all prayin’ that it’d catch. We’re
talking a tree trunk twenty-five foot thick at the base. You coulda
cut a two-lane highway through it if you’d been able to cut it at
all, and all that gas from down to Gulf was just burnin’ itself up
for no good.
“Shit,” Stub says, and he walks up to the tree to see how
much of the bark got burned, and just then the tree explodes on
one side about ten feet up. Now before you say “ain’t no tree
gonna grow five feet taller in no six weeks” you can rest assured
it did, because parts of that Husqvarna flew goddamned near
everywhere. The heat musta been enough to touch off the gas
tank on it, and another two gallons or so of two-stroke mixed
oil-fuel blew up all at once. Now there’s a difference between gas
just burning in the air and gas catchin’ that’s bottled up under a
44 | Long Live Us
little bit of pressure. The fireball was big and greasy and black
at the edges and it blew a big ol’ chunk of that tree loose above
everybody’s heads. Stub’s standin’ there with a piece of metal
from the chainsaw bar stickin’ outta his face, and just starin’ at
the tree like he can’t believe it, and meanwhile the blast had bit
just far enough in. The dry wood in the crease Nester’d made
before with the Husqvarna lit up, and the whole fuckin’ tree
finally caught.
“Holee Christ, run!” somebody yells, and everybody
starts runnin’ in all directions. Jenny’s got her granddad over one
shoulder still cryin’ but yellin’ a little too. Shamefully nobody
stopped to help her. The flames was really climbin’ now and
they’d set into the good wood, poppin’ knots left and right like
shotgun shells and rainin’ fire and ash on everybody’s hair and
shoulders. Somehow the wind picked that same moment to start
bein’ just the littlest bit breezy, and faster than you’d a thought
possible that big frigger of a tree was—as the firefighters say—
fully involved.
It were a big tree, and make no mistake, but it were still just
a tree, and wood will do what it will do. Like I says, everybody
was runnin’ at this point, just haulin’ ass. Nobody knew where
that thing was gonna fall. And we’re talkin’ a tree that was half as
tall as the Sears Tower (I looked that up). Wasn’t no place within
an eighth of a mile safe from that tree, and maybe even further
on account of it bein’ on fire. Shit was fallin’ outta the sky and
that was on fire, and I ain’t makin’ that up.
Anyways, so Stub’s just standin’ there still lookin’ like he
walked into the pointy end of a Indian spear, and Rocky’s runnin’
back towards the tree to try and get him, but that’s when we all
hears this big ol’ noise. I ain’t ever heard nothin’ like this noise.
It was like—rippin’—sorta, I guess. The middle of that tree split
open and the top of ’er starts to tip a little, and everybody’s just
lookin’ up like somethin’ from outer space is about to fuckin’ fall
on ’em even though they all knew it was just a tree.
So down it comes, and maybe if I’d ever been under
artillery fire I’d have said it was like that. The whole ground
shook. The bang was so loud I couldn’t hear nothin’ for a minute,
and the next thing I know I’m just cold all over and it’s all smoky
and dark. Right in the middle of the afternoon. Smoky and dark,
the whole sky. I stand up and I’m slippin’ and slidin’ somehow
but I don’t know why, and I’m scared that all of this cold means
somethin’ bad. I’m thinkin’ Jesus John Wayne, they got me, it’s all
goin’ dark. But I put my hand in front of my face and I see I’m all
muddy all of a sudden.
It’s all hazy and dark like the sun just turned off and I find
Jenny and Ed Brown’s kid and I’m pullin’ ’em up the other side
of the embankment by the road to git ’em outta the water. I’m
kneelin’ along Route 4 whereas a minute ago I was in the middle
of the field, and when I stand up I look down and there’s water
everywhere. What I don’t see is the town water tower. There was
45 | Long Live Us
maybe fifteen people there that day—not countin’ Abe and Stub
who didn’t make it—and not a single one of ‘em saw the tree clip
the water tower comin’ down. But it musta, ’cause that tower
was gone and all that was left of that fire was a big ol’ cloud a
steamin’ black coverin’ up the sun.
Now ain’t many people that talk about the tree today,
specially Rocky or Steve Bishop. Rocky still lives on Route 4 next
to Stub’s old house, but he ain’t come to May’s in a long time,
and Steve Bishop moved to Alaska or somewhere. Ed Brown’s
kid got killed by a drunk driver a couple years after that, so he
ain’t around anymore, but there’s others.
When you read the official history of Garret’s Hole, you
ain’t gonna hear about Abe and the tree. They gonna tell you
that the original Garret’s Hole was a sinkhole between Route 4
and Goose Road that Bobby Garret built the Agway on top of
by accident. Well that’s horseshit. The real Garret’s Hole is that
big dip in the field next to the town barn that they flood every
year for ice skatin’. That dip’s where that tree used to be, and
the Garret in question was Abraham James Garret. You can ask
Jenny yourself.
She don’t live here no more.
Soobie, goddamn it, I’m tryin’ to tell a story.
46 | Long Live Us
The Insurgents
47 | Long Live Us
The whores in the rooms along Calle de Insurgentes in La Zona
don’t care what you spend your money on, but you get ten
minutes of time for every eight dollars you spend. They do not
like to talk or kiss and they will not tell you their names. They are
pleasant besides this, and they will dance if you ask them, and
laugh if they feel like it or if they’re high. They’re happy to help
with the rubbers. They will drowsily tell you that you were good,
baby, even if you fail. They are obliging and good-hearted until
your time runs out, after which they are curt and direct.
They are fatter than they look when dressed, and their
torsos are doughy unless they’re on drugs and don’t eat. The
whores with thinner waists and rounder hips are busier, and they
cost an extra four dollars. They smell like coffee and smoke and
canola oil and cheap bar soap and hairspray, though they never
seem clean enough and their hair is usually pulled up. They tend
toward thick necks and broad-cheeked faces under large eyes,
and they wear their hair in bangs to hide the wrinkles above their
eyes when they look up from time to time at waist height. Their
toenails are short and unpainted and the flesh along the backs
of their heels is permanently creased and yellowed. They wear
their socks unless you’ve got four extra dollars, and sometimes
even if you do. The stockings they wear, solid primary colored
thigh-highs popularized by school children from halfway across
the world, hide shocking varicosities. Their breasts are invariably
natural, some more used than others. The whores with the
nicer breasts cost an extra four dollars. Their sullenness and
impatience increases with their beauty, making the prettiest
whores both expensive and particular while the ugly ones tend
toward kindness and a congenial nature. In this respect it is better
for a customer to decide ahead of time how relaxed he or she
wants his or her whore to be before choosing a particular one.
None of the whores are young.
The rooms have beds of a strange size and depth, wider
and shorter than a twin mattress. The coverlet, usually a bright
floral pattern to contrast well with the whores’ flesh, is laid over
sheets with towels beneath to keep away the mildew. The mattress
is wrapped with plastic beneath that and there is a pelvis-sized
divot in the center of the mattress on the near, more convenient
edge. A small table or desk occupies one corner of the room, on
which is strewn a small pile of single serving mustards, a stack
of napkins, half of a sandwich on a plastic plate, and a soft drink
bottle of room-temperature water that is missing its original label.
A box of cosmetics. A box of baby wipes. A box of cigarettes. A
box of matches. There is a shelf in every room, or a place near
the door in lieu of a shrine, where a small figurine is kept of
Death wearing a red or violet dress atop her robes. This is Santa
Muerte, Holy Death, scythe in hand and white skull grinning in
her sweet, considered mission of kindness to the whores, and they
pray to her. Santa Muerte wears a variety of colorful accessories
and trinkets, depending on the particular whore, and sometimes
even jewelry or a jaunty hat. Occasionally she wears shoes. She
always stands. She always smiles. Holy Death, they say, protect
me and give me a good dying when it’s time.
Some of the whores have stretch marks along their navels
and breasts, but no children are ever in sight. Men are not allowed
to use their bathrooms and that door is always kept closed. There
are no pimps or other men lingering around who are not clients.
The policia stay parked a few hundred yards away, at the edges
of La Zona, to nod at the locals and fleece the tourists. There is
one man among the policia, he drives a blue truck, who is in love
with two of the prettiest whores. He loves the fatter one because
she laughs easily and dyes her hair blonde, somehow curling it
and making it ideal to wrap his fingers in. The thinner one he
loves because her skin smells like salt and campfire ash and he
likes to lick her entire body—her armpits, her back between her
shoulder blades, the hollow between her breasts—and she lets
him, shivering the entire time in what he perceives as pleasure.
She has a birthmark shaped vaguely like a bent finger on the right
side of her belly, and he watches it rise and fall while he kisses
her.
Rarely do the policia need to intervene with business along
Calle de Insurgentes. The whores are firm businesswomen, and
their trade is straightforward. Rules about money and fairness
are simply one more bit of tangible concreteness to add to the hot
night breeze and the dirt entryways of the rooms. Occasionally a
whore will shriek or holler at a customer and the policia descend
swiftly from their usual spots in cars or leaned up against the
sides of buildings. They come quickly, and puff their uniformed
chests to maximum size, speaking in deep, terse tones if they
speak at all, but they do little when the time comes. Mostly they
hem the customer in with the whore and allow her to settle the
disagreement herself, out of respect and perhaps as a form of
amusement. Occasionally, an unfamiliar customer will raise a
hand, or even strike a whore, after which they are arrested by
the policia and relieved of a substantial sum of money in order to
be freed. Should they prove reluctant or unable to pay, they are
generally treated to a moderate beating at the hands of two of La
Zona’s younger policia.
It is said among the whores that there was once a
problematic customer with a head shaped like a wide jack-o’lantern. His hair was stringy and long and dirty, and his teeth
were poorly cared for. The whores became quiet around him,
closing their doors for a time as he passed or asking for wildly
inflated sums when he asked their price so as to politely decline
him. This went on for some time before a gentle, sisterly whore
whose name has been since forgotten finally agreed. Accounts
of her fate vary, but most include a series of vile acts involving
substantial humiliation and discomfort. In this instance, they
say, the policia beat the man in full view of a small group of
onlookers, including the whore he had assailed, and drove away
48 | Long Live Us
with him in the back of the blue truck. There is no reason to
believe that this is the case, but the whores insist the policia drove
him into the desert and stove in his head with a shovel. The man
never returned to La Zona, and three dozen people—though it
cannot have been more than two or three—claim to have seen
the truck driving in the opposite direction of the jail. Whether or
not this is true is as inscrutable as the whores themselves but, as
with their kinder words, it is perhaps best to simply believe and
not stand too firmly on points of certainty.
The oficial de policia who drives the blue truck may know
the truth, but no one asks him. He has a wife and four children
that he complains about sometimes, while he sits at the small
outdoor bar on one end of the row of rooms. The music gets
softer and sleepier as the night goes on, and he dandles the fatter,
curly-headed whore on his lap and snakes his hand down her
pants while he drinks his beer. It is unwise to ask the whores
about their families, or indeed even to mention the word in their
hearing. Their brother is a cigarette lighter, their mother a pair of
ordinary underwear that they wear when the light outside their
door is off. Their grandfather is a serrated steak knife hidden
between the headboard and the wall, and their father is you.
Many of the whores will say that they sell themselves
because the money is good, but Calle de Insurgentes is the quiet
part of La Zona, and there is no money here. The men who
come here do not always have twenty-four dollars to pay for a
half-and-half so they try to talk the whores down to sixteen, and
then admit that they only have ten. Some of the whores will
take the ten dollars and tell the men to make it fast. Others will
tell them to get lost. A proficient whore can rapidly discern a
cheapskate and avoid him, as the time spent bartering or doing
business below the going rate is time wasted. The real money
is on the other end of La Zona, inside, where the malosos and
pandilleros bring in young girls from other towns and make them
cry and turn themselves inside out. The old whores on Calle
de Insurgentes don’t cry. They imitate a moan that sounds like
clearing their throats. They ask for the money up front and they
hide it in the tampon box under the sink. They put extra lotion
on the dry patches above their elbows and knees. They prefer the
gentle, soft old men. They bargain hard. They never smile all the
way unless they’re high. They are tired of the idea of love. They
pray to Holy Death.
49 | Long Live Us
She Was Never
Free to Begin With
Norma wasn’t sure what a bayonetting would look like, but she
somehow didn’t think it would be as quiet as it was. Joey stood
there behind Mister Franks holding the rifle in both hands and
the shiny steel tip of it stuck out through his chest. He sort of
looked down at it just long enough to see what was happening,
and then he fell to the ground like an oversized gym bag full of
football pads. Joey let him fall and it dragged him forward a little
at the same time. The bayonet came free, and then so did the
blood.
No one said a word at first. Ernie and George were off to
one side by then, and it didn’t register to her right that second but
they had probably practiced this. They practiced for everything.
She used to imagine that someday she’d try to kiss all three of
them and they’d all kiss exactly the same. Now, though, with the
bayonet and all… Probably no kissing.
Jim was seated behind her and to her left. Never one to
say all that much anyway, he let the stabbing hang in the silence
a little longer, seeking to hear the hot, embarrassing stillness of
it. Joey joined the other two near the windows facing the east
side of their classroom. The fourth boy from the Flower class,
Ronnie, moved closer to the door to keep an eye on the hallway.
Sebastian and Al looked at each other nervously and Janice in
the far back looked like she might either scream, or cry, or both,
if she could only figure out which one to do. Norma gave her a
look and Janice blinked back, in disbelief.
“Come on,” Joey said, and he, Ronnie, Ernie, and George
made for the door. As he was about to disappear without so
much as a second word about the whole thing, Jim finally spoke
up. His voice was low and colored strangely by empathy no one
was ever sure he actually felt.
“Hey Joey.”
Joey looked back at him, the non-functional parade rifle
still in both hands, useless except as a knife on a stick, and paused.
“Where’re you going?”
Joey didn’t answer.
“Get away from the windows,” David yelled from the other
room. Miss Lindsay was nice but her husband seemed like kind
of a jerk. Norma stepped back. Their apartment in Schaumburg
might have been built in the 1980s, but it smelled like it had never
been new. Heavy curtains that might or might not have ever been
washed covered most of the windows, except those that David
had specifically boarded up. The light coming in was sickly
yellow. The two of them had gone into the kitchen originally
to make a snack, but when Norma turned around, they were
actually in the bedroom at the end of the hall. The door was
open slightly and she could see they were both standing. They
were using low, terse voices, but Norma could still hear some of
what they were saying.
50 | Long Live Us
“From the school? Wait… from Gonzales? Are you out
of your fucking mind?”
“They were all by themselves…”
“They’re never all by themselves, right? That’s what you
said.”
“They were.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
She looked at him defiantly and Norma’s heart squeaked
a little. She hated it just in general when people fought, but no one
had ever fought about her before. She thought it felt a hundred
times worse.
“I thought she could sle—”
“I don’t want to hear about what you thought,” David
snapped. “In fact, I don’t want to hear anything from you at all,
so just shut the fuck up.”
A look came over Miss Lindsay then that scared Norma a
little. It looked like giving up, really giving up, but Norma could
tell it wasn’t. The rising lump in her throat meant that someone
was going to fight because of her, and someone was going to
lose, and that it would probably be Miss Lindsay.
Just give up, she thought, willing Miss Lindsay to take the
easy path. Once, a long time ago before the older boys had lost
interest, Ronnie had slapped her. He had gotten in huge trouble
for it, but she remembered the feeling of trouble all around her
being worse than the actual sting. They could all get along. She
didn’t have to be the spark that set off the gunpowder. She’d
be good. She’d stay out of the way. But somehow she knew it
wouldn’t be enough.
“Do you know what they’ll do to us if they find her here?”
“Who?” Miss Lindsay asked, her voice suddenly sharper.
“What who will do? Everyone’s gone.”
“At the school maybe, but they’ll send someone. They’re
not going to just forget about those kids.”
“The rest of them are gone.”
“They’ll find them, too.”
“No, they won’t.”
Just then David turned to look back out the crack in the
door and locked eyes with Norma. He stared at her hard for a
moment in a way that felt super creepy and then closed the door.
“W-what just happened?” Janice finally asked, now that they
were alone with the bleeding body on the floor. She was breathing
hard, but looked less pukey now.
Norma had just started to get boobs, and Marie was still
flat as a board with a funny little jut to her sternum that made
it hard to imagine her with them, but Janice had been hauling
her proto-knockers around for several months now, and her shirt
51 | Long Live Us
bobbed up and down as she tried to control her inhale and exhale.
Some of the boys in her class, especially Joey and Ernie from the
Flower class, had started to get little blue/black mustaches that
they hadn’t learned how to shave off yet, and though he was
still super shy and had a babyish face, Jim had two armpits full
of curly black hair. None of this had escaped Norma, and even
interested her, but somehow Janice’s boobs inflating like little
balloons under her shirt was too much. Too real. She felt a little
light-headed herself just then.
“What do we do?” Al asked. He and Robbie and Bill were
in the Lightning class with Marie, but they didn’t usually have all
that much to do with her. They were a little bit younger than the
rest, not as young as the Fish classroom, who were only five or
six, but younger than Norma and Jim and all of the Flower class.
They mostly just talked to each other unless someone asked them
a question directly, in which case it was usually Al that answered.
“Nothing. Just…” She paused, feeling suddenly like she
didn’t want their eyes on her the way they were now. “Let’s just
stay here. Mister Trey or Miss Stephanie will come and figure it
out.” She glanced at Jim, not sure if that was the right answer,
but not wanting to look stupid in front of the younger kids, all of
whom were whip-smart. He nodded, bless him. Sebastian crept
slowly toward the door.
“Seriously, what just happened?” No one bothered to
reply.
In point of fact, Norma couldn’t remember ever being in
class without a teacher. Unless they were asleep in their dorm
rooms or going to the bathroom, there was always a teacher
around. When they were littler, there had been one teacher for
each student, but then this was cut to one teacher for every two
students and then for the last school year they had started coming
and going in shifts. They were mostly a friendly bunch, except
for the Flower room teachers who always seemed a little yell-ier
than the rest. The Flower class was all boys and they were the
oldest kids in the school so Norma figured it was a boy thing.
The body on the floor who until recently had been Mister Franks
was one of the Flower teachers but he was also the European
History teacher for all four classes. Norma supposed he was now
technically American history, which sort of made her want to
giggle and barf at the same time.
“I don’t think they’re coming back,” Sebastian said
quietly.
“Who?” Billy asked.
“Any of them.”
She did finally manage to sneak a peak out of the apartment
window once when David went to the bathroom. She hadn’t
given up hope that Jim would be able to find them, even though
it was a long way from school. The parking lot below meant for
52 | Long Live Us
the shopping center on the first floor of each building wasn’t
bustling, but neither was it deserted. People meandered silently
in ones or twos, but no group larger than three. In some sense
they were all together in the same place, but as far apart as they
could be within that space, distributed like molecules of steam in
a glass jar. Norma thought that they looked a bit too deliberately
random.
As she was about to put the curtain back, she heard a bang.
Someone she couldn’t see at the high angle had thrown a rock or
something into the front window of their building. She heard
the tinkle of glass two stories below and flinched anyway. As if
they were a flight of migratory birds, the random constellation
of loiterers instantly converged on the storefront.
“Don’t move,” Miss Lindsay hissed. The sound itself
nearly made Norma jump out of her skin.
“Should I—”
“No. Leave it. If they see the movement, we’ll be next.”
Norma stood frozen, realizing all at once that all it would
take was for one of them to look up by chance and they’d see her
standing there. Maybe spot the top of her head or catch the glint
of sun on her hair. They wouldn’t be able to stop them. There
would be no warning. Just quiet one second, and the next they’d
be looted and burned as furiously as the storefronts below.
“Don’t move at all. Stay perfectly still.”
Sweat popped out on the soft fleshy part of her back
between her shoulder blades and slid icily down the middle of
her back to the waistband of her pants. The moment stretched on
forever. She realized she had to pee. The sun shone in on her face
and what had at first felt kind and warm now felt shamefully hot.
She would never open the curtain again. She would stay inside
forever if only…
“Can I move now?” she whispered so softly that she
herself could barely hear it.
“Not yet.”
An eternity passed. Stars came into being and exploded in
distant galaxies. Empires rose and fell. Mountains were ground
flat by the erosive caress of the wind. She was a pillar of salt.
“Okay,” Miss Lindsay finally said. Norma slumped to the
floor and started to softly cry.
Marie padded back down the hall a few minutes later and shook
her head. Sebastian had been too much of a goose to go himself.
“I don’t see anybody. The doors are all closed except for
where they broke through.”
“What did they break?”
“The window by the science room. The big one next to
the water fountain.”
“Sooo much trouble…” Sebastian murmured softly.
Which was just silly because no matter how much the teachers
53 | Long Live Us
would yell at them or make them write the rule they broke a
hundred times on the dry erase board, they never really got into
much trouble no matter what they did except for hitting each
other. No one had ever bayonetted a teacher before, though. The
only one who was going to be in super big trouble was Joey, and
once he did that, heck, why not break a window or two?
Norma made as if to follow Marie down the hall again,
and Jim got up to go, too. Billy and Sebastian were instantly on
their feet.
“Don’t leave us here!” Billy said.
“Okay, okay. Listen, we can all go.” She looked around at
them, and then at Jim. “Should we all go?”
“Yeah, let’s check it out, at least.”
Janice got up. “Okay.”
They all came. The younger boys stuck close together in
a clump around Norma, Jim and Janice, with Marie a few steps
ahead to show them the way. The school was oddly quiet for this
time of day. It was late afternoon and usually they’d hear the
occasional raspy crash of metal pots from the kitchen being put
into the big dishwasher. Not today.
They found the broken window and it was just as Marie
had said: a big square of glass that extended from the ceiling to
almost the floor. It was cracked and smashed, but a chunk of it
still hung in the frame and there were dinner-plate sized pieces of
it on the floor and the grass outside. It was unclear what the boys
in the Flower class had used to break it. They were going to have
to be careful if they walked around out there. She wondered if
Joey had cut himself breaking it, and she kind of hoped he had.
Besides the fact that he had stabbed Mister Franks, Joey was just
sort of a jerk.
“Wait,” Marie said. “What about Fish?”
She’d forgotten. There’d be a teacher in the Fish classroom
because there always was. The Fish room teachers were sort
of different from the rest: quieter, more patient, and eerily
persuasive. One of them, an older man named Mister Ratzinger,
had once come out of his classroom when Joey was getting ready
to beat up Norma. This was years ago when they were littler, but
Joey was still really big for his age and there wasn’t much Norma
could do except wait to get pounded on.
Where Mister Franks would have instantly yelled at him,
Mister Ratzinger just said, “Is that any way to treat your sister?”
They had looked at each other for a moment, Joey’s hand cocked
back with a fistful of wet paper towels that he was going to rub
in Norma’s face, and he backed off. He mumbled something and
walked away, so weirded out by the whole thing that he hadn’t
ever tried to bully her again, though the two of them never got
along very well either.
The memory of that wasn’t very pleasant, but the thought
of Mister Ratzinger or the other Fish teachers made Norma feel
immediately more confident. They’d know what to do.
54 | Long Live Us
At first the apartment had seemed like a good, strong, safe place
to be, but by the third day Norma started to realize that it was sort
of small even for two people and more than a little claustrophobic
for three. In the boredom of waiting for the sun to come up and
go down, Norma made a game out of secretly looking into every
drawer, cupboard, and closet. She mentally catalogued every
hairpin, every sweater, every bottle of rubbing alcohol and even
the half-empty bottle in David and Miss Lindsay’s bedside table
of something called Astroglide that made her wipe her hand off
and retreat guiltily when she read the label.
It wasn’t to invade Miss Lindsay’s privacy she was doing
this, after all, but rather just to see what they had in the house.
She hadn’t much liked most of the books that Mister Stephenson
had given her to read in school, but she remembered a couple of
wilderness survival adventure ones. One of the first things the
heroes did (they were never girls for some reason but Norma
figured it didn’t matter) was go through all of their supplies and
take stock.
In this process, she had discovered an alarming fact: they
didn’t really have all that much food. There were some bags and
boxes of dried food including a large bag of rice in the pantry,
and some canned stuff, but that was about it. The freezer was full
of bottles of liquor instead of frozen meat, and she thought she
knew why. The power was inconsistently on and off all day long,
and food trusted to the cold in there would just have gone rancid
anyway eventually.
David drank constantly, though whenever he offered
Miss Lindsay a drink she declined. He would get smiley and
mellow when he drank, so that was just fine as far as Norma
was concerned, but if they couldn’t get more food soon, they
were going to have problems. She kept her mouth shut about it
because she felt bad telling Miss Lindsay this, and David was
either too drunk or too angrily sober to talk to. After another day
went by in the muted eternal afternoon of their living room, it
became obvious that someone would have to go out for more.
“I’ll go,” David said, and Norma caught a flash of
puzzlement behind Miss Lindsay’s smile that mirrored her own
surprise. She had thought for sure this was going to signal a big
blow-up.
“Thanks, babe,” Miss Lindsay said with what for once
sounded like genuine affection.
“You can drink if you want to,” Norma told her, when
David had gone out for more food. “I don’t mind.”
Miss Lindsay smiled at her. “Oh, that’s okay. I haven’t
drank in a long time.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Years.” In the semi-awkward silence that followed,
Miss Lindsay must have seen something in Norma’s eyes,
55 | Long Live Us
because she immediately added, “I was a really different person
back then.”
“Oh.”
Moments passed.
“Can I have one?”
Miss Lindsay looked at her.
“No.”
The Fish classroom was locked. Inside, the Chrisses (all four
of them were named Chris, which Norma thought must be the
most confusing thing in the world) were taking their afternoon
naps. They all looked very different from each other, despite
their names. There was redhead Chris, brown-haired Chris, tall
Chris, and one she thought of just as Chris because it seemed
rude to call him black Chris. Each of them snoozed lightly on
their stack-away cots with little blankets and pillows, and there
were a few stuffed animals and books on hand that had fallen
from sleepy fingers.
Jim and Norma tried banging on the door to wake them
up, but they were sound asleep and the metal was so heavy it
didn’t make a big enough sound. There was no sign of Mister
Ratzinger or any of the other Fish teachers inside or in the nearby
playroom.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Billy said.
Norma looked at him.
“Can I go?”
“Of course you can go. I’m not a teacher.” It sounded
meaner than she had meant.
“Don’t leave without me, okay?”
“Okay, just go already.”
“Just go,” Jim said, echoing her. That seemed to make
Billy feel better. He went. They sat down in the hall outside and
waited for him. Jim sat next to her, close in a nice way. It was late
spring and humid outside but the heat had mostly been turned
off and the school got a little chilly sometimes. His cocoa-colored
skin felt warm and reassuring against her forearm where their
elbows touched. Even at thirteen he was handsome. She tried to
picture him at seventeen or nineteen and had to look at the floor
so he didn’t see her blush when the gooseflesh came out on her
arms. He leaned over.
“Got any ideas?”
She realized he was talking about the windowpane and
the Fish kids and this whole strange mess, and felt a sobering
twinge of regret. Why couldn’t I have just been locked in a room
with him? she thought.
“Not really. Maybe we should try to call somebody?” This
wasn’t all that great a suggestion, and she knew it. The handsets
and computers all had passwords on them so they couldn’t be
used without the teachers’ permission. She wasn’t sure about
56 | Long Live Us
emergencies, but she was doubtful.
Jim frowned. “What about going outside?”
“Right. Or that.”
They heard the flush of a toilet in a distant bathroom
stall.
“Sounds like he dropped the kids off at the pool!” Bobby
said, smirking. Jim gave him a look.
“All right,” Janice said, suddenly her normal steady self
again. “Can anybody think of a reason why we shouldn’t go
outside and follow them?”
“Because we’re not supposed to go outside without a
teacher?” Sebastian said.
“Can anyone think of a good reason?” Janice said.
Sebastian gave her a dirty look. No one else said anything. Janice
looked at Norma and shrugged as if to say well, there you have
it. Jim looked up as well.
“I think we should go as far as we can, and see what’s out
there,” Al said.
“I’m just worried about the Chrisses,” Norma said.
“They’re fine.” Janice put an arm around her. “They’re
not going anywhere. Come on Norm.” She was about to argue,
but the other kids had already started gingerly stepping out into
the courtyard.
“Why are they doing this?”
“What? The flashmobs?”
“Is that what they’re called?”
Miss Lindsay took a minute to decide what she was going
to say next. Norma hated being talked to carefully like that. She
wished Miss Lindsay and David and everyone else would just
stop worrying what she’d think or if she could handle the truth
and just say it.
“Well, first of all, they’re called flashmobs. They do what
they do because they’re poor and can’t afford to eat or feed their
children.”
A million questions came to mind, but only one that
mattered. The real question.
“Whose fault is that?”
“Wh—” Miss Lindsay seemed to catch herself in midthought and start again. “It’s complicated.” Dead end, Norma
thought. Miss Lindsay didn’t want to talk about it.
“Why can’t they just ask for food, though?”
“There’s not enough.”
Norma wondered what it would be like to not have
enough food. Just thinking about it made her feel hungry.
“What about the police?”
“They’re hungry, too.”
“You should just tell her, Linz,” David said. Norma
hadn’t noticed that he was standing there listening, but he was
57 | Long Live Us
there, with a glass in one hand.
“Honey, please…”
“The flashmobs started when that fuckstick McCain
passed the second Patriot Act and pissed all over the First
Amendment.”
“Really?” Norma said. She remembered reading about
the Constitution in Mister Franks’ class, but this part had never
been mentioned in any of her classes. She tried to remember what
the First Amendment was. Free speech, she was pretty sure.
“David,” Miss Lindsay said, her voice icy sharp. He
looked at her for a minute before walking away and muttering
something that sounded like ‘fuck you.’
“You remember the sign?”
Norma nodded.
“When they decided not to let the protesters protest
anymore, they started flashmob swarming instead so the police
couldn’t stop them. By the time the teargas and dogs show up,
it’ll be over.”
“What are they protesting?”
Miss Lindsay did that thing again where she stopped
herself, but this time Norma thought it was probably because she
didn’t know where to start.
The school’s courtyard was a large square of lawn enclosed on
all four sides. Normally when the teachers took them out for
exercise during the day, this was where they’d go. Why Joey,
Ernie, George, and Ronnie had decided to go that way wasn’t
immediately clear until they got out and looked around. On the
far end, another window had been smashed, this one a smaller
rectangle that was set a bit off the ground. She tried to picture
what was on the other side of that window. It was either Mister
Franks’ or Mister Trey’s office, she thought. The window was
low enough to boost the younger kids, maybe, but whoever was
left outside was going to be jumping and bellying it through. The
Flower room boys had broken off most of the smaller pieces of
glass from the frame, but it still looked like something they might
cut themselves on if they weren’t careful. Whatever the boys had
used to break the window and cover the glass shards with, they’d
taken it with them.
“We need a coat or something.”
“Huh?” Janice said.
“To put on the window.”
Janice protectively wrapped her arms around herself. She
was wearing the only heavy material that any of them had on, a
light denim jacket that she seemed never to take off.
“Um, no way.”
“Don’t be a bitch,” she said, using a word she’d heard
Miss Stephanie accidentally use dozens of times.
“You’re a bitch,” Janice said.
58 | Long Live Us
“Hey,” Jim said, getting between them. “Don’t worry
about it, we’ll find something else.” Norma settled.
The clouds overhead didn’t let through a lot of light, but
even from where they stood they could see that the rest of the
school behind the other windows was dark and empty. Norma
was wondering if they could somehow break into the Fish room
when she heard the shouts.
One of the glass doors a few rooms down popped open—
not broke, but actually swung out like it was supposed to. Miss
Lindsay stepped out, followed by Miss Stephanie. They looked
like they always did for school: Miss Lindsay with her red hair
worn down over a light blouse with slim-cut slacks, and Miss
Stephanie with her dirty blonde hair pulled back from her
forehead with a black hairband and wearing a gray skirt suit.
Both of them looked as calmly nervous as Norma had ever seen
them. Miss Lindsay kicked off her heeled shoes before stepping
onto the grass.
“Careful!” Norma shouted. Miss Lindsay froze. “There’s
glass on the ground.”
“Come here!” Miss Stephanie shouted. Her voice could
get really screechy when she wanted it to. They went.
“Is anyone hurt?” Miss Lindsay asked.
Norma shook her head as they filed back into the school
building, but then realized Miss Lindsay might have meant more
than just their group. “Oh, wait… yeah. Mister Franks.”
“All right, find a buddy in your class and sit right here,”
Miss Lindsay said, before walking quickly down the hall to check
the rooms. She pulled a phone handset from its cradle halfway
there, punched in some numbers, and held it to her ear for a
moment before hanging it up. She looked back at Miss Stephanie
and shook her head slightly, then was around the corner and
gone.
That’s when Norma noticed that Miss Stephanie was
carrying something that looked like a smaller version of the
gun that the school guard had carried when there had still been
guards. She was holding it close to her skirt so Norma couldn’t
be sure, but when Miss Stephanie caught her looking at it, she
stared back hard.
She wouldn’t have time to think about it until later, but
neither Miss Lindsay nor Miss Stephanie ever asked where they
were going or why they were out in the yard.
“Okay everyone, on your feet. We’re going for a walk,”
Miss Lindsay said. She had come back only a minute later and
looked a bit more relaxed, despite the fact that Norma knew she
had gone in and probably seen Mister Franks lying in front of his
desk with a big red spot on his shirt.
“Are we going to leave the Chrisses here?” Al said. Miss
Stephanie and Miss Lindsay exchanged a tense look. Miss
Lindsay dropped down into a squat, which Norma thought
couldn’t have been easy in those heels.
59 | Long Live Us
“We’re not going to leave anyone behind, but my keys
don’t open their door, and Mister Franks didn’t have the right key
either.”
“Is he really dead?” Bobby asked.
“Duh,” Janice said, being sort of a bitch again.
“Shhh…” Miss Stephanie said, putting her hand on
Janice’s shoulder.
“Yes honey, I’m afraid he is.” Bobby seemed to take this
in. He was the youngest of the Lightning room kids, and tenderhearted, but he wasn’t dumb or a sissy. He gulped hard and
nodded as if he was just asking a simple question to begin with.
“Like I was saying, we need to go for a walk. We’re going to be
staying somewhere new tonight.”
“Somewhere new?”
“Mmm-hmm. But first we need to go get the Chrisses.”
They walked in a line back toward the Fish classroom
and they stopped a few yards from the door.
“All right, everyone sit down on the floor next to each
other.” Norma sat between Janice and Jim. Miss Lindsay stood
near them while Miss Stephanie went to the door and once more
tried her ID card strip on the door without success. They watched
as she went to the gym office, which was nearby, and used Mister
Franks’ key to open the door. She came back a moment later
with one of the baseball bats from the equipment cage and tried
to break the window set into the door. The bat thunked hollowly
off of the glass despite several good swings. She eventually threw
it on the floor in disgust and pulled out the object from before,
which was most definitely a pistol now that Norma could see it
clearly. Miss Stephanie looked at Miss Lindsay and shrugged.
Miss Lindsay nodded in return.
“All right, everyone, I want you to put your hands over your
years, okay? Like this. Do it now.” A moment later Norma saw a
puff and felt the slap of the gunshot at her ears even through her
hands. Miss Stephanie put the gun away and finished breaking
the glass with the baseball bat enough to reach in and open the
door from the inside. Out burst four tired, hungry, crying little
boys.
“What are we doing here, Linz?” David said. He had come back
from the trip out to get food in an even worse mood than usual. It
was late in the evening and Norma was pretending to sleep in the
next room. “We should just turn her in. Maybe they’ll let us go.”
“They won’t,” Miss Lindsay said.
“Well what’re we going to do? They had soldiers all over
the place, it’s all locked down, and there’s hardly anything open.
You wouldn’t believe the lines. I almost went up to one and just
told him.”
“David, listen to me: they’ll never let us go. Not now.”
Norma pulled up the blanket and slowed her breathing in
60 | Long Live Us
case they looked in on her. The heavy coverlet smelled like cedar
from the chest in the front coat closet, where she learned in her
sneaking that it had lived between the gloves, hats, and scarves in
the off-season.
“Look this isn’t my bag, here. It was your idea. I don’t
remember telling you to kidnap one of the—”
“Shhh,” Miss Lindsay hissed. “I didn’t kidnap her. I told
you what happened.”
“You caused this. You must have had some idea how you
were going to fix it, right?”
Silence.
“Oh, fuck this,” Norma heard David say.
“Wait,” Miss Lindsay pleaded. “I can take her to my
mom’s.”
“In Gurnee? Do you know how long it’ll take you to walk
there?”
“Three days, maybe two if we go fast.”
“They’ll catch you.”
“Maybe. Or maybe not. There used to be guards at the
school every day, then there was just one, then there was just us.
I haven’t seen anyone else but Tom and Trey and Stephanie for
weeks.”
“You’ve just been locking them in at ni—”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Fine. You know what? Do whatever the hell you want.
What am I supposed to do when you’re gone? I still have to go to
work. People are going to ask where you are.”
“Just tell them. I’m at my mom’s. When the foot-travel
ban gets lifted, I’m going to take her. We just need to dye her
hair.”
Norma’s mind raced, but the silence that followed had
her holding her breath. Finally, she felt the tension next door
loosen but not the tension in her own chest. The anxiety of all
of this creeping up her throat like the genesis of a really good
scream. She heard a sound that she pictured was David grunting
in resignation.
“What color are you going to make her hair?”
“What do you think?”
“Here’s the rules, everyone. We all have buddies, right?”
“Right!” two of the Chrisses responded happily.
They were at the front door of the school, beyond
which Norma had only ever been a handful of times, and each
time it was to go directly to a bus or car or some other type of
transportation. They’d never just walked out of school before, at
least as long as Norma could remember.
“We’re going to go in two groups, one ahead of the other.
If we get separated, we’re going to meet at sixty one twenty six
west Golf Road. Everybody got that?”
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A general mumble.
“Say it back to me.”
“Sixty one twenty six…”
“…West Golf Road.” She finished with them. “Don’t
forget it.”
“What’s there?” Marie asked.
Miss Lindsay smiled at her. “My house, sweetheart. You
guys are going to see my house today.”
This sent a ripple of chatter through their little group until
Miss Stephanie told them to hush up, and they started walking.
At first, they stuck close to each other, the Chrisses even holding
hands, but eventually they spread out to arm’s length. Miss
Lindsay and the Star classroom went first, followed by Miss
Stephanie with Lightning and Fish.
The made their way from the parking lot down a street
called Highwood, past a funny little traffic circle thingy, and
through a series of shopping plazas full of storefronts. Some
were vacant behind huge display windows, and others were
quietly doing business with the occasional customer. The coffee
shop seemed the busiest of all, with half a dozen people waiting
in and around the store, one or two drinking from tall paper cups.
“I’m hungry,” Redhead Chris said, loud enough for
Norma to hear it far away. Miss Stephanie whistled sharply once
and Miss Lindsay halted her group to let them catch up. They
were close enough now, even with their backs turned to the kids,
that Norma could hear what they were saying.
“We may need to get them fed.”
“I don’t think we can risk it.”
“How much farther is it?”
“About six miles.”
Miss Stephanie looked over her shoulder at her group
briefly.
“They’re not going to make it.”
“Can we carry them?” Miss Lindsay asked. Miss
Stephanie seemed to consider it.
“I don’t think so.”
They walked a bit more until Miss Lindsay spotted what
looked like a pharmacy, and they brought the group to a halt.
Outside the store was a long line of people standing between two
rows of blue wooden sawhorses. On either side of the line, men
with guns stood watching. After a brief conference, they decided
that Miss Lindsay and Norma would stand in line to get the food
while Miss Stephanie and the others split up and kept off to the
side.
After an hour or more in line, they were finally admitted
to the store. More guards stood watch in the aisles, and Norma
thought this was absurd since there was hardly any food on them
anyway. Most people who had come were lined up for the drug
counter, which had a steel cage welded over the front pick-up and
order window. They bought a bag of potato chips, a package of
62 | Long Live Us
individually-wrapped string cheese snacks, and three large bottles
of something called Gatorade, which looked like some kind of
basic juice drink and had no discernible connection to alligators.
Miss Lindsay paid for these with a credit card and Norma got the
idea that it was an unusual one when the cashier gave them both
a funny look while she bagged their food.
Norma noticed as they walked out that the sun was
finally coming out from behind the clouds when the whole world
seemed to eerily stop and hold its breath. The guards on either
side of the incoming line must have noticed it too, because she
saw some of their rifle muzzles dip a bit just before the world
exploded into fire and smoke.
Norma was still getting used to her new haircut. There was a
mirror in the bathroom that she could look in, but the sight of
herself as a blonde was unnerving even after the tenth time. The
short, spiky haircut did little to soften the jarring difference from
her usual brown curls.
“I’m so sorry about this,” Miss Lindsay kept saying, as
Norma’s hair fell in tufts into the bathtub. It was just hair, so
she wasn’t all that worried about it, but for some reason Miss
Lindsay felt like she needed to apologize again and again, which
worried her.
“Here, look,” Miss Lindsay said, while Norma waited
with the color setting into her roots. She took the scissors and
started cutting her own hair.
“No!” Norma said. Miss Lindsay’s hair was a gorgeous
natural auburn that she had admired for as long as she had known
the older woman. She had been forever jealous of that hair and
how it matched the pretty constellation of freckles across the
bridge of her nose. “It’s okay, you don’t have to.” Miss Lindsay
smiled at her and gave her a hug, but she cut her hair anyway.
When it was done, they looked almost like mother and daughter.
It was sort of a cute look on Miss Lindsay, and the more she
looked in the mirror, the more it grew on her.
David, however, hated it. He was drunk and the air around
his head smelled like the first whiff of escaping fumes from those
little jars of nail polish remover Norma sometimes used. Drunk
and talking; shouting almost. Loud enough so that Miss Lindsay,
who was in the kitchen making coffee for him even though he
had told her fuck off, could hear it.
“Some people have a marriage,” he said, “and some
people have…” he whirled his hand, indicating roughly the
western half of the world, “this.”
Norma thought David must be about the biggest a-hole
on earth. Maybe even a bigger a-hole than the guard at Alberto
Gonzalez who used to call her Eminem ever since around the
time they all got lice once from the littler kids in Fish and had
to shave their heads. The Chrisses were always getting into
63 | Long Live Us
something, always touching each other and everything else with
their grubby hands. Anyway, that guard was a grade-A jerk. And
this was worse.
“Here,” David said, patting the seat next to him on the
couch. “Here, I’m going to tell you a secret.” Norma didn’t move.
He continued anyway, leaning forward. “One time we had a kid.
Lindsay and I. It didn’t work out. On a good day, our...” he waved
again, conjuring the word with his hand, and pretending to hunt
for the vocabulary whilst actually just swallowing back a bile-y
burp, “...conversations revolve around how to solve problems.
On a bad day, she is the problem.”
Norma wasn’t sure what ‘didn’t work out’ meant, but it
didn’t sound good. He got up, took a chair from the kitchen table
so briskly that it frightened her a little, and sat backwards on it,
straddling it, facing her directly. He gave her another of those
creepy looks.
“Jesus, you do look just like her…”
Miss Lindsay was balancing a cup of coffee on a little
plate. It was steaming and Norma could smell it from halfway
across the apartment. Miss Lindsay’s eyes were drawn, as if in
pain. David leaned even further forward and cupped his hand
over his cheek conspiratorially. His breath smelled like dirt and
gasoline. He lowered his voice as if to share the secret.
“Let me tell you, ever since that, the only sex we have
is the kind where she looks at me and says ‘fuck you.’” David
looked over his shoulder and spotted Miss Lindsay there. He
grinned at her. It was a big, fake grin that made Norma feel a
little queasy. “Well, I may not be all that,” he turned back to
Norma and winked at her, “but I do have a bag of chips.”
That’s when Miss Lindsay set the cup of coffee down on
the table and stabbed him.
In the instant after everyone seemed to all stop breathing at once, a
man in line near the door reached behind his shoulder and pulled
his sweatshirt hood up over his head, another man reached down
the front of his baggy pants for something, a woman casually
reached into her purse. Norma saw all of this and at the same
time really didn’t see it, because at this same moment she felt
Miss Lindsay yank her hand so hard that she dropped the food
and almost tripped out of one of her shoes.
Something hot snapped past her face that she would later
think may have been a bullet, but she would never know for sure.
She was grateful for its distraction because it meant she didn’t see
the initial surge of violence as it happened. Bricks, chains, metal
bars, and bottles of lit gasoline clashed suddenly with rifles and
it looked for an instant as she glanced back as if everyone had
started dancing. Except there was blood, and a few people were
on fire. She ducked her head down low and ran as fast as she
could, keeping pace with Miss Lindsay and never letting go of
64 | Long Live Us
her hand.
They ran past an empty department store, hugging
the grimy brickwork so they wouldn’t get separated by people
running in every direction. There were shouts from the street
and the pops of occasional gunshots that made her flinch every
time. A man wearing a Little Mermaid mask stepped out right in
front of them and opened the door of a lovely old jewelry store
that looked like it had been there for many years. He hurled in
a firebomb and then braced his shoulders against the door from
the outside as the interior started to fill with inky smoke. Norma
could see hands slapping the inside of the glass.
Above the occasional pop of pistols and rifles came the
thud of heavier weapons. The soldiers had come, finally. They
were slow. Too slow to stop the flash swarm, but fast enough to
mop up whatever made the mistake of not getting out of the way
after. Smoke tendrils thicker and whiter than the smoke from the
gasoline bombs started filling the street. Norma sensed the acrid
sting coming before she actually felt it and instinctively pulled
the neckline of her sweater up over her nose the way that the
Flower class boys would do when one of them farted, but Miss
Lindsay shouted “No!” and pulled it down again.
It was getting hard to hear by then, but Miss Lindsay put
a hand on Norma’s chest and mouthed something that sounded
like slow and then normal. Norma understood. They slowed
to a fast walk and proceeded calmly past a group of helmeted
and uniformed men marching in formation with their rifles held
ready. None so much as took a second look at them, though as
they passed, Miss Lindsay pushed Norma’s head and shoulders
down at the sound of more gunfire.
As quickly as it had started, it was amazingly almost
over. No sooner did they cross the street than the soldiers started
dragging people out of the smoke and zip-tying their hands
behind their backs. They had rounded up several people and
were separating them out into groups. One group went to an
ambulance, with sirens that just wailed and wailed. Norma didn’t
know if she’d ever heard anything that loud. She wished they’d
stop. The other group walked slowly over to one side with their
hands over their heads. The soldiers took away their baseball bats
and caps and turned out their pockets.
Amazingly, she recognized one of them. It was Ernie. His
curly black hair was matted against the side of his head and one
of his eyes was swollen shut where he’d been kicked bloody. At
one point or another, Norma had found each of the Flower class
boys attractive, but Ernie was the youngest and somehow the
most serious. He was half-stumbling and still trying to reason
with the soldiers.
“I’m worth more alive to you than dead. Tell your
commander who I am…”
One of the soldiers kicked him anyway, and he went
sprawling. He stood in a line of five other boys and men against
65 | Long Live Us
the side of an old school bus. It had once been yellow, but was
now the color of grapefruit from the broken windows downward.
In front of him, men were pointing rifles. Their eyes were hard.
She squeezed Miss Lindsay’s hand, and the older woman
squeezed back. She looked away just before the guns smoked and
crackled. They walked twice as fast. As fast as they could without
openly running. Miss Lindsay would yank her hand every time
she slowed. Finally, once they were well away from the school,
farther than Norma had ever been, they slowed to something like
a real walk. Miss Lindsay stopped and helped her wipe off her
face. Tears had streaked clean spots in the dirt under her eyes.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Is it because of Ernie?”
Norma nodded.
“Listen,” she said, trying to get close to Norma’s face,
filling in the world to the edge of her vision. “Listen.”
Norma listened, whimpering and trying not to let her
knees twitch.
“Norma, sweetheart. You can’t imagine what they’re
capable of. What you’re capable of.”
“What about everyone else?”
Miss Lindsay’s eyes flickered above and behind Norma’s
head for a second. “It’s just us now. Come on.”
Miss Lindsay followed David down to the floor as his feet gave
out on him. Norma could smell the ammonia scent of pee as the
front of his pants darkened. He kept trying to reach out to either
side of his ribs and push the hole in his spine back together. It
didn’t work. She knelt over him and squatted down to his level,
and stabbed the knife into his neck with both hands to stop the
gurgling, but by then there wasn’t all that much fight left in him.
Just a little slapping like the wings of a hurt bird against her
cheeks. Miss Lindsay didn’t flinch away from it. She kept her
hands tight on the knife’s handle and drove it straight through to
the floor. In a moment, David was silent.
“Why—” Norma whispered as Miss Lindsay put the
knife in the sink and reached for a towel. It came away from her
hands red. She took hold of the liquor bottle and drank long and
deep, not stopping to breathe between gulps.
“The fucker waited till I was nodded out one time, and he
took our baby, my baby. My little sweetheart Rose. He wouldn’t
tell me what he did with her. Not for the longest time. I stayed
with him because he knew, you know?”
Norma nodded, somehow, but she was sure she didn’t
know.
“I got him drunk one time. Really fucking drunk. Not like
what you saw here, but drrrrrunk. He told me he had wrapped
her up in a blanket and put her in a dumpster. I asked him which
66 | Long Live Us
one, and he said he didn’t remember. But I think he did. So I
stayed. I needed to know which one. Wouldn’t you have wanted
to know which one?”
As she wiped her face, blood from her hands smudged
one cheek. Norma gave a little yelp.
“What?” Miss Lindsay said, seeing the look on Norma’s
face. She glanced sideways at the small mirror on the shelf above
the basin. “Oh,” she said, cracking an involuntary smile that
Norma thought lovely and terrible at the same time. She wiped
the smudge away like it was just makeup after a long day. “Were
you saying something?” Miss Lindsay asked her, seeming finally
to remember that Norma was even in the room.
“Who did he think I looked like?” she asked softly.
The older woman smiled at her. “Never mind, honey.
Here, grab his legs.”
She held Miss Lindsay’s hand as the two of them picked their
way through what once must have been a lovely planned housing
community. There were curtains in every window and some of
the houses had big TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT signs in
their front yards, despite being only a few feet from the next
house over, and often even sharing a fence.
The lawns were overgrown with weeds and wildflowers
and in one yard a stray dog drank from the bowl of a crooked
birdbath. Norma gave a little whistle, but the dog ran away rather
than to her.
Something caught the corner of her eye. “Hang on,” she
said to Miss Lindsay, and walked over to it. The posted notice on
the street light pole was bright yellow and cheaply copied to the
point where parts were pale and smudged.
“There are Fascists here?” Norma asked. “In Schaumburg?”
Miss Lindsay looked confused for an instant, but then
took her hand again.
“Come on. We’ve got to get inside before it gets dark.”
Norma shouldered her backpack with the cans of food
and the bottle of hair dye inside and they kept walking. She tried
not to look back as they walked, but it was hard. She felt like
67 | Long Live Us
every step was taking her farther and farther from the way things
were supposed to be, and deeper into a place she just didn’t
understand.
She hadn’t known what to expect on the outside, but
this wasn’t it. There was nothing to recognize. In the books and
videos, there were always kids riding around in school buses and
a boy or girl on a bicycle delivering newspapers. Everyone’s lawn
was trimmed and sprinkled. The paint was fresh. Someone was
always being born that would change the world someday, maybe
be rich someday. Cities were full of people being who they were
always meant to be, people laughing or crying or making friends
or making love, whatever that meant. This place, no matter how
many neat-rowed homes and stoop-shouldered people they
passed, was simply too angrily quiet, too insufferably still to be
hers.
68 | Long Live Us
Habitat for
Humanity
69 | Long Live Us
“Jesus, Jackie, if it bothers you so much, you should sign up too.”
“Yeah, right.”
Jackie and Simone stood at a chest-high fence beneath the
Mass Driver. It looked like an enormous artillery piece suspended
from a long row of eight-story support girders. The barrel of it
cast a shadow wide enough to reach them. Several other girls and
women stood nearby, but no children. They couldn’t be trusted to
keep their earmuffs on. The last girder before the muzzle sported
a giant green clock, counting down the last few minutes of the
prelaunch sequence.
“I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life here, but
seriously, men are dicks. The last guy I dated posted this on
RateMyGirl.com.” She handed Jackie her phone and on it was
a photograph of Simone, naked and spread-eagled on a narrow
college dorm bed. Without clothes, Simone couldn’t hide her
rectangular torso. Her straight black hair was pulled in a hundred
lazy directions against the pillow and her heavy eyelids, which
Jackie had to admit were pretty, were half-closed over a smirk.
The sheets were twisted, but Jackie could see the slightly damp
Cottleville Cougars emblem peeking out beneath her vulva. She
had been ranked “8.1”.
“Kind of makes me want tacos,” Jackie said, handing it
back.
“Don’t judge, bitch. He didn’t give me a chance to clean
up first.” Simone looked at herself on the glowing screen for a
moment longer, frowned, and clicked away to something else.
“I don’t know why I even drove you here. It’s not like you didn’t
see this coming. We’re talking about Kyle, remember? The same
Kyle we’ve known since seventh grade when he named his dick
‘The Belly Stabber’.”
“Yeah. I know,” Jackie said, looking down past her flat
chest at her equally flat stomach. Kyle had come for her red hair
and stayed for her abs. It turned out the Belly Stabber wasn’t
so bad after all. “I’m not even showing yet, though. What a
douche.”
“It’s the oldest story ever told,” Simone said. She returned
to surfing. It was nearing sunset and her face was electric white.
Behind them, an older woman was softly sobbing. The lady was
wearing a nice wool skirt, of all things, as if her loved one might
be able to see that she had dressed for the occasion. Jackie didn’t
know if they had cameras in the loading area at the other end.
The barrel was so long that the breech was miles away in the next
town over. They couldn’t wait there because the gate security was
really strict, so here they all were, standing in a parking lot near
the business end, getting ready to wave at something that would
be moving too fast to see.
“Can he really hate me that much?”
“Babe, he doesn’t hate you. He just hates high-pitched
screams and the smell of spoiled milk.”
“But he has to know what this will mean for me, right?
He’s turning me into an after-school special.”
“You can tell him when he gets back. He’ll still be all hot
and young. How long is this trip at speed? Two, maybe three
years? We’ll be in our fifties.”
“Ugh, I don’t even want to think about that. He’ll probably
fuck someone else and then sign up for another trip.”
“Maybe he’ll still fuck you. You’re mom’s still pretty hot,
and she’s forty.”
“I’ll kill him if I see him.”
Simone gave her a sizing stare. Jackie melted a little. “You
really liked him, didn’t you?”
Jackie nodded, and felt a little weepy. Hormonal or not,
the hollow in her chest felt real.
“You could go to the doctor and catch up with him,”
Simone suggested. Her voice turned somewhat less sarcastic at
this. They’d had this conversation before. They just switched the
ultrasound frequency and it was over. It didn’t even hurt. She
could be on the next payload up to low orbit, where the punch
coil would accelerate her to a hundred and eighty-two thousand
miles per second. Anyone who was healthy and physically large
enough to withstand the gees and the EM field from the punch
coil’s supermagnet could go. With no zygote in her uterus to
messily liquefy, she could do it.
And then what? Settle down? Have kids? Even if she could
get on the next outbound shot, Kyle would still beat her there by
almost an entire year.
“I’m so glad I’m not you right now,” Simone said.
The clock ticked down to the last minute. An alarm
sounded to remind them to put on their earmuffs. Jackie pulled
hers on tight and held them against her scalp. The airhorn sound
turned to a softer, less-insistent chirp. She felt a lumpy sensation
in her stomach, hungry and full at the same time. She wondered
if the baby could hear the launch; if it could hear anything.
Simone thumped her on the shoulder and pointed a finger
to their right. The older woman they’d heard crying earlier was
climbing the fence. Simone mouthed something inaudible and
took off toward her. Jackie had an idea that she meant for them
to try and stop her, but Jackie just stood there, and so did the rest
of the small crowd. The woman flopped to the other side and
started running out into the restricted area.
The muzzle beyond the fence was as wide as a subway
tunnel and its bottom lip was at least seventy feet from the
ground, so it was unclear what the woman planned to do, but she
ran toward it anyway, losing one of her kitten heels as she did so
and revealing a Band-Aid on the bottom of her foot that flashed
with each step. A few yards from the green clock, she tripped and
went down hard on all fours, skidding in the grass.
Simone returned suddenly, and smacked her again, this
time hard. Jackie turned to look at her and Simone had an extra
set of earmuffs in her hand. Jackie inhaled so sharply that she
70 | Long Live Us
thought she might finally throw up from her queasiness, and
looked out at the woman. She knelt in the grass, facing the way
she had fallen, and was screaming at the ground. She had a pretty
jawline over delicate bare ears, and her mouth dropped open in
a long wail. All that made it through Jackie’s earmuffs was the
thin, reedy keen of a small animal.
The giant green clock ticked on all zeroes. An invisible
hand punched Jackie dully in her chest, pushed her sternum
back toward her spine and sucked the air out of her lungs. A
thundering boom, uncomfortably loud even with the earmuffs,
unrolled itself overhead. Simone would later tell her that she saw
a brief puff of coherent motion at the muzzle of the Mass Driver.
Jackie never took her eyes off of the woman, who reached up for
her ears too late and crumpled over sideways on the grass.
Jackie felt Simone grabbing at the back of her windbreaker
as she flipped herself over the fence. There would come a time
when this would be impossible, when she’d look like a branch
with an overlarge orange weighing it down, but for the moment
she was still long of leg and strong of body. She jogged out to the
woman in the field and knelt beside her.
The woman lay curled into a half-circle on her side,
opening and closing her mouth as if her jaw had been pulled off
and put back on askew. Jackie was afraid to touch her, but touch
turned out to be unnecessary: the woman sat up on her own.
She stared at Jackie uncomprehendingly, and blood of the thin,
watery kind ran down the sides of her jaws beneath both ears.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Simone said as they
approached the fence. The woman was wobbling and leaning
hard on Jackie’s shoulder, and they walked slowly together. The
warning siren cut off and they could hear each other again,
though Jackie’s ears still felt mildly popped. “Oh, shit. Is that
blood?”
“Yes. Help me with her.”
Jackie finally reached the fence and put the woman’s hands
on it. She was clear-headed enough to know that Jackie meant it
to steady her. Simone just stared at the two of them. Jackie made
a little up-and-over motion with her head. The woman took a
deep breath and tried to get a toehold in the fence. Jackie stood
beneath and pushed, and Simone helped her down on the other
side. The woman wasn’t as heavy as she looked, though the skirt
made it hard for all three of them.
“Are you okay?” Simone asked the woman, who didn’t
reply.
“She can’t hear you.”
Simone stood in front of her and got right into her face.
“Are you,” she pointed to the woman’s chest and then made the
okay sign with her hand, “okay?”
The woman nodded. “Okay,” she said. It came out
sounding like “Oak hey.” Her eyes started to roll into the back of
her head a little, and Jackie caught her as she tipped to one side.
71 | Long Live Us
“Let’s go.”
“What?”
“She needs to go to St. Mary’s.”
“Can I talk to you for a sec?”
Jackie sat the woman down with her back against the
fence and walked a few paces away to talk to Simone.
“There’s no way I’m driving this crazy bitch all the way to
St. Mary’s,” Simone said.
“What’re we supposed to do?”
“We aren’t supposed to do anything. I drove you here so
you could wave bye-bye. That’s it. I have class in the morning.”
Jackie looked back at the parking lot. The rest of the small
crowd had dispersed and gone home. Simone’s Mustang and an
old station wagon were the only cars left.
Simone bit her lip. “Goddamn it, Jackie…”
They hauled the woman to her feet and into the passenger
seat of the Mustang. Jackie sat in the back on the tiny rear
bench, buckled into the middle position. Ten minutes and a few
Missouri backroad miles later, Jackie gestured to the woman to
give her her purse. The woman, looking less glassy-eyed now but
still unsteady, said “Why?” a little too loudly. Jackie took out
her own handbag and retrieved her driver’s license. The woman
seemed to understand. She handed Jackie the purse.
It was getting dark now and Jackie had to turn on the dome
light in the back. “Her name is…” Jackie said, thumbing through
the woman’s wallet, “Rita. She’s from Jeff City.” Simone glanced
up in the rearview mirror. In the transparent plastic sleeve next
to the woman’s driver’s license and credit cards was a photo of a
young boy, eight or nine years old. He wore a cowboy hat and a
grin from ear to ear. Jackie passed the wallet and purse back to
her.
“Which way?” Simone asked.
Jackie took Simone’s phone, which was nicer and more
expensive than her own, and pulled up a GPS map. It wasn’t like
St. Louis or Kansas City where they could get lost or take the
wrong exit and end up in a bad neighborhood. They were in the
sticks. The roads didn’t diverge much. Jackie realized that the
whole thing—Rita, the blood, all of it—was genuinely freaking
Simone out. The idea of Simone nervous while she herself was
so calm made Jackie feel weirdly fearless. She forgot, at least for
the moment, Kyle and his parting gift.
“First star on the left and straight on through till morning,”
Jackie said.
Simone turned around to face her, not watching the road.
The moment stretched on uncomfortably. They were going fifty
on dark one-lane roads with low gravel shoulders.
“Uh, just stay south on sixty-one,” Jackie said. Simone
turned back to the wheel.
Jackie found a Starbucks receipt in her purse and wrote
on the back of it. That’s Simone and I’m Jackie. We’re going to take
72 | Long Live Us
you to the hospital. I think you hurt your ears.
She handed it to Rita, who read it and nodded. Rita
turned a little so she could see Jackie and pointed to her jaw,
opening and closing her mouth several times. She frowned.
“Thanks for th’ride,” Rita said, again too loudly.
“YOU’RE WELCOME!” Simone shouted back at her.
Rita smiled, unfazed. Jackie looked into the passenger side footwell and saw that one of Rita’s feet was bare. They’d forgotten to
go back for her shoe. At the end of her stockings was the wider
forefoot of a woman who’d spent most of her life standing in
sub-par footwear. The toes were splayed out and her pinky toe
bent inward in an unnatural direction.
Rita dabbed at her ears with a small stack of napkins
that Jackie found in the Mustang’s center console. They weren’t
bleeding as badly now, but Rita’s cheeks were pale red where the
smudges were starting to dry. The world slid by silently outside
the low windows. Simone turned on the radio. This far out in the
sticks they could only pick up the local AM public access station,
which was currently playing Tchaikovsky’s waltz from Swan
Lake. When Jackie and Simone were in middle school, they’d
learned to play the middle section of the waltz on rows and rows
of Casio keyboards in music class. Her fingers involuntarily
curled a little with the music, and though it was too dark to see if
Simone did the same, Jackie suspected she did.
Forty-five minutes outside of Cottleville they stopped at a
gas station with an attached Taco Bell Express. The car still had
half a tank, which momentarily confused Jackie.
“I was just kidding about the taco thing.”
“I didn’t eat dinner before we left. I’m starving,” Simone
said. She put the car in park and went inside.
Rita turned and looked at Jackie quizzically. Jackie
shrugged and pointed at the neon sign. Rita thought about it and
then nodded. They got out. Jackie rummaged through Simone’s
gym bag and gave Rita a pair of shower flip-flops to wear. Rita
was much steadier on her feet now and could walk just by holding
onto Jackie’s elbow. Jackie thought of her prom, when she’d held
Kyle’s elbow like that, and flashed on a moment in the near future
when she imagined she’d need someone to help her waddle into
the hospital with a bowling ball between her hipbones.
They took a seat at one of the booths behind a comforting
plastic tabletop and stools bolted hard to the floor. Simone stood
in line for them.
“What do you want?” she asked them.
“Crunchy gorditas.”
“How many?”
“Uh.” Twelve, she thought. “Two.”
“What about her?”
Jackie turned to Rita, who smiled back blankly.
“Get her a number eight.”
“Crunchy or soft?”
73 | Long Live Us
“Soft.”
As Simone was putting in their order, a woman somewhere
in age between Jackie and Rita came in trailing four young
children. They were a mixture of boys and girls, but they were
uniformly hollering and raising hell. They raced back and forth
through the small seating area next to the counter and chased
each other with tiny robots or dolls held out like miniature war
totems.
One of the boys sprinted past Rita and tripped over her
purse. The child hardly missed a step, but the mother shot Rita
a dirty look as Rita pulled her bag up and into her lap, holding
it close. Simone returned with a giant tray of tacos and enough
napkins to top off her glove box.
“See what you have to look forward to?” Simone said.
Jackie supposed she deserved it after the taco comment.
The children were now at the counter and pulling down
whatever they could get their hands on. A heavy plastic container
of nickels and pennies for Muscular Dystrophy slid off the edge,
nearly hitting a boy who looked just a shade past two and a half.
It hit the tile floor like a falling bomb and coins flew everywhere.
“Don’t touch it, it’s filthy,” the mom said, and waited like
a Gorgon for the teenager behind the counter to pick them up
and finish taking her order. The boys and girls cheerfully ignored
her and picked up as many loose coins as they could carry.
Jackie located Rita’s soft tacos and slid them over toward
her. Rita honked “Thank you,” which made everyone in the
restaurant look up at them, including some of the children.
Jackie unwrapped one of the gorditas and sauced it.
“Come on,” the mom said. “Everyone in the bathroom
right now. We need to all wash our hands.” Three of the four
went peacefully. The fourth, a girl, stood her ground and refused.
“Come on, sweetheart.”
“No,” the girl said.
Mom held out her hand. The girl wrapped both arms
around herself. Mom reached out to take the girl by the arm.
The girl screamed and flung herself to the floor, crumpling and
lashing out with her feet wherever possible. Mom, to her credit,
managed to get two hands around the girl’s waist while avoiding
the kicks aimed at her throat and pulled the girl up into a standing
position.
“Stand up!” Mom said, as close to shouting as she dared.
The girl’s knees went rubbery and she tried to head-butt
her mother. Mom had clearly seen this move before and tossed
her own head back just in time to avoid a broken nose. The girl
screamed full in Mom’s face once more, shrill enough that Rita
started opening and closing her jaw again. Though Jackie saw
it only over Simone’s shoulder, the little girl hauled back and
delivered a closed-fist punch to her mother’s cheek so hard that
the smack could be heard twenty-five feet away.
“You’re in trouble.”
74 | Long Live Us
“No, you are!” the girl screamed at her.
“You need a time out.”
The other three children stopped by the bathroom door
and watched this exchange, the youngest one looking like he
might also start crying any moment. Mom noticed this and
decided to cut her losses. “We’re leaving,” she said, and then all
four of them began to cry.
Jackie swallowed the final bite of her first gordita and
offered the second one to Simone. Her stomach lurched. For the
first time she realized that maybe she didn’t just feel disappointed
in Kyle. Maybe she hated him. Maybe she only hated him. If she
was going to spend the next three months barfing into the toilet,
the least he could do was stick around to hold her hair back. She
drank a little bit of Sierra Mist and her stomach settled.
Simone dumped their tray into the trash on the way back
to the Mustang, and Rita took two of her three still-wrapped soft
tacos and put them into her purse. Simone noticed the flip-flops
finally and rolled her eyes at Jackie. “What the hell?”
“Be nice.”
“She can’t hear me anyway.”
“Be nice,” Jackie said, in the same half-pleading voice
she’d used on Simone their whole lives. Don’t tell. Stay longer. Be
nice.
They rode most of the rest of the trip in silence, and
half an hour later they could see the lights of Cottleville in the
distance ahead, reflected against the low clouds like an aura. The
small state highway was mostly deserted, but a few cars passed
them. It was dark, and Jackie could only make out Simone and
Rita by the ambient glow of the headlights in front of them.
She took another receipt, this one the copy from her
gorditas, and wrote on it, trying to keep the letters straight and
readable. I saw the picture of your son. He looks adorable. She passed
it up to Rita.
The older woman turned it around in her hands and put it
close to the glow from the stereo so she could read it. She nodded
and handed it back with a smile that looked like someone had
bent a frown with a hammer. She took out her purse and the
picture of the boy. She showed it to Jackie again, and Jackie took
a longer look. Simone glanced over too. Rita sobbed, and Jackie
knew.
“What?” Simone asked. She glanced over at Rita.
Rita stabbed a finger at the picture, and then pointed up
at the roof of the car and beyond it. Her driver’s license listed her
date of birth. She was fifty-two years old. Even the shortest trip
to Habitat for Humanity—just a there-and-back for men like her
son to run a crane or dig vent holes in the regolith for the volatile
gas tanks—lasted thirty years of Earth time.
“Fuck.” Simone spaced the heavy word out as though it
had syllables.
When they reached St. Mary’s, Rita made as if to give
75 | Long Live Us
Simone’s flip-flops back, but Simone insisted she keep them. Rita
yelled, “Thanks!” and gave them both hugs. Jackie squeezed her
hard and helped her to the door, hand-to-elbow even though Rita
probably didn’t really need it anymore. Simone waited in the car.
The intake desk at the ER scrutinized Rita’s insurance cards, and
Jackie helped explain to the triage nurse what happened when
they finally called Rita’s name.
BIRCH, WHERE R U? Simone texted her.
TRIAGE.
IT’S 10 CLOCK.
I KNOW. BE A HUMAN BEING, WILL U?
I’M LEAVING.
LEAVE THEN.
Jackie could see through the waiting room to the parking
lot where Simone still sat in the Mustang. Pale arms rose and
came down with fury on the steering wheel. The car’s horn let
out a tiny fraction of a beep, muffled by the sound of the air
conditioners filtering and recycling the air and the drone of CNN
on the waiting room television. Simone stayed put.
“It’s good to be home,” a man on the television said. He
was young and rugged and handsome, his posture unbent by
work or worry. He’d made a record three trips to the colony and
was old enough to be Jackie’s grandfather. They were standing
near the large open door of a hangar beside other passengers
disembarking from a payload module. Several men and a handful
of women with duffel bags were walking quietly out into the
sunshine toward the bus stop. No one came to meet them.
“Any plans for a fourth trip?” the newscaster asked.
“Oh, of course! Yeah. Once I get my hands on some decent
beer and wings and catch up on the news.”
“What about family? I’m sure there are some people that
are interested in seeing you—”
“Hey, it just occurred to me: have the Cubbies won the
World Series yet?”
The newscaster laughed. “Regrettably, no.”
“Oh man, they are never going to win that.”
The newscaster chuckled. “It sure looks that way, doesn’t
it? So, do your children or grandchildren know you’re back?”
The man’s eyes stopped smiling even though his mouth
didn’t. He backed away a little and half turned as if to leave. “You
know what, I’m sorry. I’ve gotta go for now. I need a haircut bad.
Nice talking to you!”
Finally the triage nurse admitted Rita to the urgent care
wing, and Jackie walked back outside to the waiting room. On
the way out, her gordita slowly lurched its way back up her throat
until she felt like she couldn’t breathe or swallow. She ducked
into one of the hallway washrooms—it might have even been a
men’s room, she didn’t stop to look—and heaved hard into the
toilet.
The release was a heavenly one. Her abs strained hard,
76 | Long Live Us
grabbing her guts and straightening them like a kinked garden
hose. The tacos flowed up and out, and each strain dug deeper,
harder, reaching for the bottom of her. The tips of her light
red bangs, curled under with care each morning to frame her
otherwise boyish face, dangled into the toilet water inches from
her eyes. She gasped when she could breathe again and tried not
to inhale the tiny flecks of vomit on her lips.
She turned on the water in the washroom, sucking up
handfuls of it and spitting them back out to still the burn in her
throat. She tried to dry her hair too, but the damp strands still felt
pukey against her face. Jackie stumbled out of the bathroom and
sat down hard on a bench near the triage nurse. She looked up
through the skylight.
Outside, the clouds had blown over and the sky was full
of stars. For a moment, the darkness illuminated with a quick
silent blink like a far-away flashbulb. The punch coil circled
above the Van Allen Belt, but it could still be seen with binoculars
on nights like this. When the payload went through it, half the
world looked up to see the flash.
She burped, and the nurse noticed her.
“You okay, sweetheart?” the nurse said.
“Yeah,” Jackie said.
“You sure?” The nurse saw Jackie’s hand go to her
stomach. “You want to see somebody?”
“Maybe,” Jackie said.
77 | Long Live Us
The Woman
in the Pit
78 | Long Live Us
They sat in uncomfortable judgment of the woman in the pit, or,
more specifically, in judgment of the matter of her appeal. In the
juristic sense, her guilt was established. Their decision presently
was to determine only if the judgment had been arrived at in
error in some way. This was very nearly a foregone conclusion.
The present triumvirate were the same three judges who had
sat the original case. Despite his unease with the verdict, Judge
Adovasio knew they had performed in a procedurally satisfactory
fashion. As always, Judge Butler delivered their finding.
“Mercy,” Lucretia began, “is the drama of the animal
writ across the canvas of the human. The story of nature told
by the super-natural.” She was quoting the Isoform, the Code
of Equality. He heard the words but was still transfixed by the
woman below. She sat naked at the far edge of the sunken stone
cylinder, glaring at him under unkempt black hair. He gave only
half an ear to Lucretia, but it made little difference. All court
justices, down to the most junior, were familiar with this part
of the Code. Mercy’s promise is great, but its price is high. It bestows
moral altitude, and steals order. Mercy is a judge’s most imprecise, most
hazardous tool.
When she finished the litany from the Code, the Isomatrix
paused for a moment before continuing ad hoc. At twenty-five
Lucretia was the youngest Chief Justice ever to sit the bench,
and her legend was already growing. Though she was no beauty,
alongside Adovasio and the elderly Judge Gregory she seemed to
positively shine.
“The wisdom of the Isoform is self-evident. We have
new words for it that our forebears did not. We can point to the
building blocks of our own tissue code and say confidently that
the laws of animalia are not our laws. We are clarus cogitans, and
no longer of the animal kingdom.”
Adovasio resisted the pull of admiration, but she squarely
grasped the will of their high office and wielded it the way a tiny
still fulcrum wields the endless power of physics to bend a lever.
“And thus must we be human and not animal in our
decision.”
There would be no reversal of the verdict, but still the
woman in the pit dragged at him. He could see her huddled form
in his peripheral vision where she always was. He wanted her
to move so he could see she was still alive. He wondered at the
pain in her belly, and if this didn’t somehow fittingly echo the
hollowness of her womb.
He’d heard the rumors. Little enough of it was true. She
drowned her baby! loose talk supposed. She set it on fire! She shook it
until its neck snapped! She smothered it in its bed! Just look at her—does
she look remorseful to you? When they sentenced her, she smiled and said
she’d have done it again!
In point of fact, she had smothered her baby. At the very
least this could be known from examining the tiny body. It was
unclear if this was accidental, but it did not appear impossible.
Young people did occasionally die, though the cause was
almost invariably known far ahead of time and prepared for,
no examination needed. Accidental death of children was rare
in the extreme, and infanticide was unheard of in his lifetime.
It was a deeply troubling case for everyone. Logic should walk
always before emotion for a Justice but, like the rest, Robert
found looking upon a lifeless child like being throttled by an icy
hand from the inside of his own throat.
Any dead child seems a special sort of small, but this one
was very young. The woman in the pit was supposed to surrender it
as promptly as her hormonal osmosis permitted. Unlike animals,
human children were taken as quickly as possible from their
parents and raised en masse in seclusion. Cloistered teachers of
a special sort, magistrae if one wanted to use the old word—and
one might, as they were often as old as the stones their schools
were built from—tended the young as they transitioned through
the phases of growth. Every corner was softened, every collision
padded, every risk minimized. Their bodies were protected from
every predation and misuse, and their minds shielded from the
careless word or vaguest of prejudice until they could adequately
recognize and defend themselves against such things.
It was unsettling to feel that old animal hollow in the
inverted peak of his ribcage beneath his heart. This was the place
that always ached dully when he thought of the children he had
never fathered, and when he saw another man’s photos of his
own progeny. Even if he’d had sufficient spermatozoa, he had
difficulty imagining the tiny crying thing being taken from him
and spirited away to school until it came back to him more or
less fully grown. He had secretly hoped for many years that when
he was too old to carry out his civic duty he might be allowed to
be a teacher, and to spend the last of his days among the young,
watching them learn and play. But this was just a daydream. A
clerk or lawyer might have eventually retired, but judges sat their
benches for life. The teachers of the schools were themselves bred
from infancy to be harmless, blameless creatures devoid of even
the slightest impatience or cruelty. The children in their schools
only learned of things like malice and revenge in a conceptual
way, or from ancient texts.
The fact that she hadn’t given up the child in a timely
fashion was an especially damning piece of evidence against
her. Inquiries had been raised about how and why she had been
allowed to be alone with the child, as generally the first few postpartum months were the most hazardous for all children, but
this investigation had turned up only a befuddled nursemaid
who was beside herself at having been asleep when the child was
extinguished. Guilt followed like the fall of a heavy curtain.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Lucretia asked
later, as they walked down the steps of the courthouse toward
the city. Robert knew she referred to his lapse in concentration
from before.
79 | Long Live Us
“No,” he said. Any other time, this deliberate aloofness
would be lost on Lucretia, but where her court was concerned
she tended to be more perceptive. She took his left hand, stepped
in front of him and took his right. She seemed smaller when not
behind the bench, but her eyes were unchanged. She peered at
him under arched eyebrows, shifting to meet his eyes playfully.
He wondered if such a show was appropriate in public.
“Come on,” she said, through a measured smile. That she
was young was a central fact to her, but even once he came to
know her Adovasio often found her jarringly, even alarmingly
young. He gave her hands a squeeze and let them drop.
“I don’t know what to think about all of this.”
“Psh… who does?” she agreed. “I don’t think it’s ever
happened in my lifetime. Yours?” First a child, then a woman.
Child. Woman.
He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting
the pit, either.”
She frowned a little. “Well, I hope you’re not pinning that
one on me. The law is clear about that. What were we supposed
to do? It’s not like there’s some other punishment.”
“Right, right. I’m not saying it’s wrong, just—It’s just
unnerving, don’t you think?”
“How so?” She seemed distantly interested, which wasn’t
a good sign. It usually meant she wasn’t really listening.
“Have you ever watched someone starve before? I’ve
never even been hungry, that I can remember.”
“I think dead babies are unnerving.”
“Oh for sure, I just don’t know about,” he grimaced,
“that.”
She nodded. “It’s okay to disagree with the verdict, but it
doesn’t bode well for someone so new to your position to be seen
as distractable.”
He let out a sigh, hoping that it sounded enough like
regret and self-loathing to satisfy her. She was young, but she
would never let him forget that she sat the bench before him.
“In any case, there’s nothing to be done now but wait.
Headed this way?” She indicated the direction of her building
with a slight tilt of her head down the street that led to it. It was
not the direction of his apartment.
“Mmm-hmm.”
He awoke from a dream of something gnawing at him and
stumbled from his bed onto the terrace outside of his front door.
Wrapped in warm pants and a shirt with a long coat, he walked
toward the courthouse. It was a clear, starry night and he didn’t
need a light. Concrete gave way to flagstones, and flagstones
to hewn rock stairs descending past thick pillars. Soon he had
passed the rows of cement-slab seats in the gallery and was in
the amphitheater proper. It was cold and the woman in the pit
80 | Long Live Us
shivered. An oculus in the roof above left the pit under the open
sky and the light of the moon. He sat at the pit’s rim and watched
her. She shuddered uncontrollably and her breath came in
strained wheezing gasps. Despite himself, he felt an unexpected
stirring. He’d had liaisons with dozens of women, but never one
who looked so alive. Even with his clothes and coat, Adovasio
could feel the chill. To her, it would be…
What would it be? he wondered. He took off his coat and
let the cold night air pull away the warmth from his armpits and
throat. He could feel the skin over the large muscle groups contract
and stipple in gooseflesh, and there was a hard sort of numbing
throb where bones were prominent. His cheeks, his knuckles, his
elbows, his knees, and the sides of each ankle began to burn a
bit. It was a deep and unpleasant feeling, but therein was some
secret he wanted. He said nothing to her and she couldn’t have
known what he felt, but perhaps she did anyway. She stared at
him through eyes squinting out the pain. It occurred to him that
his legs dangled far enough into the pit that if she had enough
strength left she could jump and grasp his feet. Would he have
tried that if he were her? Was it cruel to dangle them there like
that? Still not knowing quite why he had come, he shrugged back
on his coat and turned to go. He spared her one more look as
though she might vanish if he took his eyes off her.
“I want to show you something,” Lucretia said. They were in a
corner of the library reserved for fragile paper copies of older
works, many of which were ancient. She opened a steel drawer and
out slid a thin stack of paper. It might once have been bound, but
whatever adhesives or mechanism for holding the book together
had been carefully excised and the delicate leaves of paper were
subsequently encased in UV-resistant archival polymer for safe
handling. It appeared to be printed in pictographic script and had
hand-written notes in the margins that were carefully preserved
in old English. They took the manuscript to a desk near the open
second-floor window, where the sunlight made it easier to read.
“A lord named Ikeda Shingen was sorting out a quarrel
between one of his samurai and another man. The samurai
apparently started the fight and then beat the man senseless until
the samurai’s comrades pulled him off. Shingen decided that both
men were to be crucified and the samurai’s friends banished, not
for fighting but because he said a fight like that should be to the
death.”
“Wh… Is this about what I said before?” Adovasio said.
“Just stay with me for a second. What do you make of
this?” Lucretia asked.
He looked at the impenetrable characters that marched
down each page at him in neat columns. “I’m supposed to make
something of this? It sounds like just typical balagan to me. By
that logic, it doesn’t matter who was guilty.”
81 | Long Live Us
“Oh, but it does,” Lucretia said. “And it’s more than just
a point of honor. It’s fundamental to the way we live our lives
now, and it illustrates—Here.” A library page was wandering
past with a tray of refreshments and she stopped him. She took
two biscuits from the tray and held them both in front of her.
One biscuit she closed her hand on, crumbling it into pieces and
letting them fall to the floor. Adovasio watched, a bit nervous that
one of the librarians would admonish them. The page didn’t even
blink. Lucretia seemed unconcerned. The other biscuit she took
in her right hand, turned, and threw as hard as she could out the
window. It flew out and down in a lazy arc, slowly disappearing
from view and presumably landing somewhere in the planters
ringing the foundation on the ground level.
“Right here, right now, which one of those biscuits is
easier to eat?”
“What?”
“Just say the first thing that comes into your head.”
“Um… this one, I suppose.” He pointed at the crumbs on
the floor.
“Really?”
He thought about it, but couldn’t be sure what she was
getting at.
“If you had to eat one of those right now, which one
would you rather have? The one that’s on the floor, or the one
that’s completely gone?”
“Well, this one you can still eat.”
“True, but it’s not a biscuit anymore. It’s just filth that
used to be a biscuit.”
“I can’t eat that one out there, so how is that even an
option?”
“Because you are the variable there. If you can let go of the
immediate physical need to eat the biscuit, you’ll agree that the
preferable one is the one in the courtyard that’s still a biscuit, or
at least was one until it left my hand and went to some unknown
fate. Just because you can’t eat it doesn’t diminish its biscuit-ness.
The only reason you would even consider eating that,” she said,
pointing to the library page who had begun sweeping up the
remains of the crumbs, along with whatever dust and grime were
on the floor alongside it, “is out of your willingness to dismiss
the ideal thing in favor of something inferior. That’s desperation,
Robert. Why should you compromise? What is a person who
forever accepts an inferior concept of things, but a slave?”
They walked back toward the drawer and she closed it
carefully, almost reverentially.
“Yamamoto Tsuentomo wrote that over a thousand
years ago, with just paper and ink. It was before storage media
had evolved beyond simple hand-copies, and the fact that it has
survived the subsequent centuries is quite remarkable in itself.
But the message is what’s important. Shingen wasn’t punishing
the fighting; he was punishing the ambiguity. Otherwise you end
82 | Long Live Us
up with situations like that woman out there where no one feels
right about it no matter what you do. Non-resolution is worse
than death in the bigger picture.”
“That can’t be right. That’s... I don’t know what that is.
Awful is the word that comes to mind.”
“It’s not. A person lost completely is better than one
reduced to an animal. Not just better for them, better for everyone.
If the samurai had just killed the man in the story outright, it
would have resulted only in the death of one man, not two.
The other samurai who pulled him off could have remained in
service, and Shingen his lord could have spent the time he spent
deliberating the men’s fates doing something helpful instead for
all of his other subjects.”
“People are not biscuits,” Robert said, seeing now where
she was going with this but not wanting to agree.
“Aren’t they?”
He looked at her sharply. She tried hard not to show any
discomfort at this, but discomfort was there.
“Flour, milk, eggs, strengths, weaknesses, desires… it’s all
the same.”
“Aren’t you crumbling the biscuit by letting her rot there
in that hole?”
“No,” Lucretia said. “She’s an outlier of some sort. She’s
like a stone in a basket of biscuits. No real woman would ever
do that to a child. Or animal, either. She didn’t eat her baby,
she strangled it. There’s nothing to do but put the stone back
outdoors with the rest of the gravel. Eventually nature will do
with her what it will.”
Adovasio gazed at Lucretia as she stood at the window with a
corona of sunshine outlining her tiny body. The male gaze it had
been called in antiquity, as though it weren’t the most natural hardwired impulse in the human mind, and central to the hegemony
of behaviors necessary to overcome selective obsolescence of the
fledgling kingdom.
The Isomatrix was just five feet tall and she cut a scrawny,
ordinary figure with features miniature and doll-like when not in
her robes. Her usual young lioness stature seemed to Adovasio
not diminished exactly, but distorted as though he were looking
at her through the wrong end of a telescope. Her mousy blonde
hair took the light and diffused it across his face where he lay
on her bed. In the courtroom, she was like a force of nature, her
mind a calculator of human sums that left all others struggling to
keep up. Lucretia the girl, though—and she was a girl, for what
else would you call such a homely elfin thing—carried about her
naked person only an echo of the mystique she conjured so easily
elsewhere.
I’ve been thinking about the woman in the pit, he wanted to say,
but didn’t. An admission of that sort might jar her too abruptly
83 | Long Live Us
back into the headspace not conducive to sex. This was a woman
too inwardly focused at most times in any case to easily tolerate
distraction. One moment her irises would widen thrillingly at the
response in her body, and the next she might say something like
“I’m troubled at how deeply the discursive nature of heuristics
affects any given moment of my moral certainty,” and then walk
away having forgotten him completely.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes, why?”
“You’re looking at me like I’m a bug.”
“A... What?”
“An insect.”
“I heard what you said, I just don’t understand.”
She frowned slightly, which broke some of her spell.
“I’m used to getting looks like that. You don’t need to
explain.”
“I...”
“Really, it’s all right. I’m different here, aren’t I?”
It seemed like an innocent question, but such questions
were traps. Naked she might be, and gawky and tiny and possessed
of a further but harder-to-categorize awkwardness, but she was
still possibly the most utterly brilliant human being alive. He put
his neck into the trap willingly. She wasn’t trying to measure his
taste, only his capacity for obscuring the truth. Only she could
make him feel this tested.
“A bit, yes.”
As soon as he’d said it he regretted it, because the look that
followed on her face, or perhaps it was a twitch of her throat, or
the set of her narrow hips or a slight downward bob of her plain
brown nipples as she sighed, or a cant of her narrow shoulders
into a position of weariness, gave away the hope she’d had like
the tiny heart-wish of every girl who had ever taken her clothes
off in front of a man. It struck him then that sincerity was the
strangeness he’d identified earlier.
“Come back to bed.” he said, gently.
She smiled at this uncomplicated suggestion, and did so.
Some days later he entered the courtroom feeling for certain
that this would be the morning when he would find the woman
dead in the pit, but there she remained, arms hugging her knees,
peering up at him from under the fall of her tangled, inky hair.
There was no sign of feces in the pit with her. At first he took
this to mean that someone had cleaned the pit, but then realized
she had most likely re-ingested it to still the claws of hunger in
her belly. He tried to remember if it had rained since he’d last
been there, and he thought it likely. Dehydration would have
accelerated her death.
He noticed that the ends of her hair looked as though
they’d been chewed on. Perhaps the autocannibalism rumored to
84 | Long Live Us
be a typical feature of her ordeal was in fact true. No one had been
punished with the pit in recent memory and such things could
not always be believed. If so, he expected that soon he might
find the edges of her fingernails and toenails chewed where the
skin was thick enough to bite without pain. Then would come
the hard, calloused flesh of her heels, and then who knew? Her
smallest fingers and toes if she could stand the pain? She might
absently chew the drying, dehydrated strips of paper-thin flesh
from the surfaces of her lips until she dragged off one that bled.
She’d worry at these while she slept, awakening with cracked and
bloody raggedness along her mouth where her jaws had moved
involuntarily while she slept. For now, though, she had her hair,
and if she could keep from vomiting it up, she might still have
some time.
“I can’t do it,” Lucretia said. They were in chambers pulling
robes over their heads.
“I am not asking, then. I’ll file the motion myself.”
“All right,” she said, putting up her hands and trying hard
not to roll her eyes. “Forget for a moment that I stand in your
way and ask yourself how it would play out. It can’t be done. No
one will swallow hypocrisy like that, even if we lost our minds
and decided to just ignore the law. There’s nothing fair about
letting her go.”
“We’d have to make people believe we were doing it for a
good reason. We could spin it—”
“Spin? SPIN? Never mind that spin is the sort of thing
that made us necessary to begin with, but even if we wanted to
be as flexible as Barry and Stengold and Hays and all of the wild
cannons, this isn’t the old days. It wouldn’t work.”
Loose cannons, Adovasio thought. She’s so young.
“We don’t even have sloganeers that effective anymore.
People just aren’t that gullible. I mean, can you imagine? Whalesized lies like that? This land is your land, this land is my land. All
that implicit promise... No one believes those things anymore.
Even when it comes to fairness, no one cares about it if it doesn’t
directly concern them. When it’s not about them, people are
vicious.”
“Which is why we have to make them see it our way.”
“I’m sorry, Robert, it’s just over for her. There’s no other
way, and there’s nothing you could have done. It’s not your
fault. Why do you feel like it’s your fault? You didn’t suffocate
her baby, she did. She just decided to stop being a human.” She
softened visibly, in what he imagined she thought was a smooth
and soothing manner. “We—” she said through an exasperated
smile, “we did her a favor. If it weren’t for us, they’d have grabbed
her walking out of the courtroom and torn her apart. And then
we’d have to put them in the pit.”
“We’re tearing her apart right now.”
85 | Long Live Us
Lucretia bit her lower lip and looked up at him,
demonstrating a patience she didn’t actually have.
“I’m overturning this.”
“You can’t.”
“I can. I am.”
“It’s not on the docket, and there’s no room for it today.”
“What else is there?” he said, turning toward her one last
time. She didn’t cower exactly, but her smallness and his largeness
could suddenly be felt between them. “Has someone else been
killed today?” The answer to this was no. Almost no one was
ever intentionally killed. Most court sessions were concerned
with hour after endless hour of debating whether someone on
the edge of transgressing an obscure point of law had in fact
transgressed it. Even an accidental death was enough to make
them feel like they needed a nap after hearing all of the exciting
and unusual facts.
“It won’t work.”
He held up his right hand, which she half-recoiled from
before she realized he didn’t intend to hit her with it. “You see
this arm?” She nodded timidly. “Watch this.” He turned and
walked through the door into court.
Judge Gregory sleepily looked up from his notes over
his glasses and eyed them. Gregory was the oldest of the three,
and had required in recent days having things repeated to him.
The sight of the two judges that shared his bench flying out of
the door to chambers, however, was enough to break his general
torpor.
“I’m entering a motion,” Adovasio said as he strode
toward the bench. Lucretia had recovered herself and was on his
heels.
“Please make a note that this is over my firm objection,
and that it’s completely out of order!” she echoed, trying to
out-shout him. She sounded like a small chirping bird with an
outsized voice.
“I move to release the prisoner in the pit immediately and
remand her to her own custody.”
“On what grounds?” Judge Gregory asked, more curious
than truly demanding.
“That the pit is overly cruel punishment.”
“You are aware, Justice Adovasio, that this case has
already been decide—where are you going? Judge Adovasio!”
Gregory looked befuddled as Robert strode past the bench, not
pausing until Lucretia finally overtook him and stood directly in
his path.
“Move,” he said.
“I will not. This isn’t correct procedure.”
“No. It’s not your stupidity. You always quote this,” he
said, pointing at the Isoform. He raised his voice to include
the entire gallery. “But this is what animals do. Ungulates and
hindgut fermenters. If we’re humans and not animals, then how
86 | Long Live Us
come the best you can do is cut one of your own loose and turn
your back and leave her for the rain and buzzards?”
“What are you suggesting, Judge Adovasio?” one of the
junior justices in the gallery asked.
“I’m suggesting you think for yourself, you sheep.”
“There’s no need to be adversarial,” the man said,
stunned.
“The best I can do?” Lucretia said with an indignant
snort. “Did you forget that you were behind the bench?”
“This was not my decision—”
She ignored him and raised her voice to include the gallery as
well. “Perhaps you’d have us uncloister the children as well? Can
you imagine what that would mean? Things are the way they are
for a reason, Judge Adovasio.”
He whirled on her. “They’re sent away because you sent
them away. And when they come back to us from their padded
world with heads full of padded thoughts, this is what they’ll do.
More of this.” He gestured to the pit, and the woman within was
following him with sharp eyes.
Gregory stepped near to him as though to take hold of
his arm. Adovasio tore his shoulder loose and squared up to the
older, slower man.
“Put a hand on me,” he dared. Gregory flicked his eyes
to Lucretia. “Don’t look at her. Put a hand on me.” Gregory
must have seen something he didn’t like in Adovasio’s face, and
he backed away, hands forward and palms out in a placating
posture. Robert stepped to the edge of the pit and looked down.
The woman was staring up at him curiously. She uncrossed her
ankles and looked prepared to stand. She was little more than
twigs and flesh. Lucretia moved close to him as if to block his
way again.
“You can’t do this!” she whined. He raised his arm again
as he had done in the courtroom and once more she flinched,
this time accompanied by a collective gasp from the gallery.
You people disgust me, he thought. He walked around
Lucretia and stretched his arm down into the pit to take the
woman’s hand. No one moved to stop him. Though there was
plenty of strength in his arms, she was the lightest thing he ever
lifted, like a wounded hummingbird or a small ghost from the
bottom of a grave. Her finger bones were as narrow as her smile
and only a bit wider than the tracks of bright flesh beneath each
eye where fresh tears had washed the dirt away.
87 | Long Live Us
Acknowledgements
I’d like to take a moment to thank Jason Pettus, Allegra Pusateri,
and Lori Hettler at CCLaP for their tireless help with this book,
my mentors Dan Stolar, Miles Harvey, Rebecca Johns-Trissler,
Hannah Pittard, and Amina Gautier, as well as my friends in
the DePaul Cabal who provided me with feedback on many of
the stories in this book: Sam Toninato, Maureen Clancy, Jen
Finstrom, Raul Palma, Jillian Merrifield, Zack Carlstrom, and
everyone at The Writers Guild and the Chill Squad, my trusted
first readers Paul Hughes and Cynthia Tyler, and of course my
wife Beth and my son John, without whom none of this would
be possible. I don’t deserve friends and supporters as amazing as
you all are.
Mark R. Brand
is the author of the novels Red Ivy Afternoon (2006), Life After Sleep
(2011), and The Damnation of Memory (2011), as well as the editor
of the 2009 anthology Thank You, Death Robot. He is a two-time
Independent Publisher Book Award winner and is the creator
and host of the video podcast series “Breakfast With the Author”
(available on iTunes). A native of northern New York, he currently
lives in Evanston, IL with his with his wife and son, and teaches
English at Wilbur Wright College. He is currently completing a
PhD in English with a focus in Creative Writing at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
CCLaP
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