“When things get bad, you’ll call me.” He raises his voice, shouting through the doorway. “Call me anytime, R—! I’ll be waiting.”
• • •
His voice echoes in my ears as my third life—my real life—reclaims my mind. I hear my name on his lips and I mute it out. I redact it. No matter how far my past encroaches on my present, I will not take its name. I won’t let it scribble over the one I built with Julie.
The plane is dark, but the world outside is gray, the sun lurking somewhere just below the mountains. Julie is asleep by my side, still curled into a tight ball. The air is cool and her arms are wrapped around her bare shoulders, trembling. I tuck her old quilt around her, but her spasms don’t subside.
“Wait,” she whimpers, a faint bleat that barely escapes her lips. “Mom, wait. I’m awake.”
It occurs to me that my blank slate is an outrageous luxury. My terror of losing it seems pathetic when I think of Julie’s dreams. I fight my past because it’s a wild animal creeping into my clean house, but Julie has spent her whole life sleeping next to hers, its hot breath on her neck, its bloody drool on her sheets.
I drape a second blanket over her shoulders, just in case. The air is cold. Icy upper atmosphere mixed with vintage oxygen from the plane’s tanks. A strange feeling, breathing the air of another era, imbued with the sounds and smells of a world long gone. I wander down the aisle, running my hand over the soft leather of the business-class seats. These seats once cradled the world’s rich and powerful. Not the richest or most powerful—those had private planes and private smirks and metal briefcases full of secrets—but the ones who could afford to pay double for a little extra distance from humanity. Wherever they are now, if any survived the world’s shift from plutocracy to kratocracy, their presence lingers in the indentations in these seats. The hairs and skin cells in the carpet. The echoes of their voices, call me anytime . . .
I shake my head and blink hard and focus on the window, on my feet, on—
“Archie?” M says in a quiet rumble. “You okay?”
He is slouched low in a reclined seat, apparently just waking from a pleasant nap. Nora is asleep against the window two seats away, curled into a fetal ball like Julie.
“Fine.” I start to walk past him, further into the plane, but he holds out a hand.
“Don’t fight it.”
I stop. “What?”
“You make it a fight, you’ll lose. Doesn’t have to be a fight.”
I give him a level stare. “Yes it does.”
“Just memories. How bad could it be?”
“Don’t know. Don’t want to.”
He smiles. “Archie. Always so dramatic.”
I glare at him. “My name’s not Archie.”
He upturns his palms, genuinely puzzled. “Why not? Good a name as any.”
“Made up for Grigio. So he’d think I was normal. It’s a lie.”
He shrugs. “It’s a name.”
I shake my head and look at the floor. “A name should have meaning. A story. A thread to people who love you.”
I glance up. His smile is trembling like he’s fighting laughter. “Lover boy,” he says. “So complicated.”
I walk away, wishing the first-class cabin had a door instead of a curtain so I’d have something to slam.
I roam to the rear of the plane. A delicate snore alerts me to Sprout stretched across a row of seats, her little head poking out through a pile of blankets. She’ll be like me someday. She’s already halfway there at six years old, the furrowed brow, the lofty goals and worldly worries. I don’t know whether to be proud of her or afraid for her.
There are times when I miss being mindless. Moments when I wonder if consciousness is a curse. Are blunt minds truly happier than sharp ones, or do they just travel smaller peaks and valleys? A flat line of lukewarm contentment, immune to despair but incapable of rapture? This is what I tell myself when I’m faced with untroubled folk. I tell myself over and over.
The sun finally crests the horizon and the windows restrict its light into fat golden beams that cut through the cabin, lighting up the dust. Another fine summer morning. We should be getting close.
I open the bathroom door to check on my kids and find them upright and alert, holding their Carbtein close to their faces like the cubes contain the mysteries of the universe. I am thrilled to notice they’ve been nibbled.
Joan looks up at me with clear focus in her gray-brown eyes, and I wonder what shape her line takes. It’s certainly not flat. These kids have known trouble. Their lines soar and plunge, from almost-life to pseudo-death and perhaps now back up again. But why this oscillation? Three months ago, when they peeked out of their grave, what didn’t they find? What disappointment sent them back to bed? What are they waiting for?
Their attention drifts away from me and settles on the bathroom wall. They stare at it like it’s a window, like they’re enjoying a first-class view of the sunrise instead of the gray fiberglass of their shit-stained jail.
“Our friend,” Joan says.
“Your friend?” I repeat, hoping to seize this thread and draw her further out. “Who’s your friend?”
“Goldshine,” she says, turning around to give me the first smile I’ve ever seen on her face. “Sunboy.”
“Far away,” Alex says. “Lonely.” There’s an eerily nuanced unhappiness in his voice, not just personal sadness but empathy. Compassion.
“Help us call?” Joan pleads with me. “Tell him to follow?”
I stare at them, stunned by this sudden burst of volition. But I have no idea what they’re talking about. Before I can try to decipher their cryptic blurts, Abram’s voice crackles over the intercom.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are currently passing over Detroit, Michigan, America’s most thoroughly exed city, and will be approaching the Canadian border shortly. I don’t expect any turbulence but this is wild territory, so I can’t make any promises. Time to wake up.”
My kids continue to watch me expectantly. Their look says that I’m an adult, a powerful authority possessed of all knowledge, wise and capable and tasked with their protection, and that the world is mine to give them. But I’m a stumbling amnesiac afraid of his own name. I’m a bitter teen drinking bitter sermons and living in terror of the world. I’m a boy in a Mickey Mouse shirt, and these kids are beyond me.
They watch me back out of the bathroom. They watch me shut the door.
ABRAM’S ANNOUNCEMENT has stirred Julie and Nora out of their coiled sleep positions, but it’s not until the sun strikes their faces that they finally wake up, blinking and squinting against the hot rays. I take my seat next to Julie but I don’t say anything yet. She sleeps badly and wakes up worse. I’ve learned to give her a few minutes to shake off the shadows.
Detroit spreads out below us like a concrete desert. The totality of its ruination is visible even from this altitude, an uncommon grayness without even the usual sprawl of vegetation to cover its bones. I thought the notes in Abram’s cabin mentioned “facilities” in Detroit, but I must have misunderstood the shorthand because it’s impossible to imagine anything alive down there. There’s something almost unreal about it, a place so fully forgotten that it’s beginning to deliquesce. I feel a queasy sensation as I let it fill my vision; the flatness sinks and gains depth, the streets twist and flex—then Julie looks over my shoulder and the streets are straight. The ground is flat.
My need for sleep may be more dire than I realized.
“Good morning,” I tell her. It sounds inane, like a greeting from a hotel desk, but hearing my voice helps clear my thoughts.
She ignores me. She stares out at the city. “It’s so empty.” Her voice is low and croaky. I can hear the residue of her dreams in it, a lingering sadness. “Looks like it’s been empty for centuries.” No, not sadness. Disappointment.
I press my face to the window, scanning for any signs of activity, but from this altitude I wouldn’t see much even if it were there, just th
e abstract line art of the streets.
“Mom would cry if she saw this.” She sounds even less present now, like the dream is pulling her back in. “There were these artist communes trying to rebuild the city. Mom thought it was going to be the key to everything.”
Burned houses. Caved-in factories. Dead parks full of gray trees.
“As usual, Dad convinced her she was wrong. Which . . . it looks like she was.”
I watch the city dwindle into a sparse scattering of industrial buildings and then finally surrender to empty flatlands. I wonder how many “keys to everything” have come and gone throughout history, and why they never seem to open much. Have we been putting them in the wrong locks?
“R,” Julie says. “Can I ask you something?”
I hear a spike in her tone. Her eyes are still glued to the window, but her posture is stiffer, and the dreamy languor is gone.
“All those years you were out there . . . roaming or whatever . . . did you ever feel things from your old life?”
I hesitate. “Feel things?”
“I know you didn’t remember anything, but did you ever feel, like . . . the residue of a memory? Maybe a song that made you sad for no reason, or a piece of junk that you just had to take home?”
I try to intercept her gaze, hoping to discover what’s behind this abrupt change of subject, but she continues to look past me while she talks, the vacant stare of a medium conversing with ghosts.
“All those knickknacks you collected, you must have had some reason for picking the ones you did, right? They must have had some connection to your past.”
“I guess so,” I say, but I have to force the words out. Why is she taking us into this territory? It’s not safe here.
“So you weren’t totally blank, even then. There was still something nudging you.”
“Maybe?”
“What about . . . places?” She finally breaks away from the window and meets my searching gaze. Her face is placid; she’s doing a solid impression of casual curiosity, but I can see something else lurking behind her eyes. “Did you ever feel pulled somewhere? An instinct to take a certain road, follow a certain direction?”
She watches me intently. I’d love to give her whatever she’s looking for, but all her questions have the same answer: a vague and mushy maybe. This is as certain as things get in the world of the Dead. What could she be hoping to find there?
A friendly ding chimes on the intercom.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Abram announces, apparently starting to enjoy his captain schtick, “we are now approaching London, Ontario, and will begin a gentle descent toward Toronto . . .”
Julie holds her stare a moment longer, her lips pressed tight, then gets up and shuts herself in the restroom.
I glance at Nora, but she’s not eavesdropping this time. She and M are engaged in their own conversation, something about how much they miss coffee. I feel my stomach lift as the plane begins to shed altitude.
“If you look straight ahead,” our captain continues, “you’ll see the end of this great country, both literally and figuratively.”
I look ahead as directed, eager to shake off the uneasy feelings that have attached themselves to my mind like little burrowing parasites.
“We passed the original border a while back, but that one was a bit too restrictive for America’s expanding waistline, so we had to loosen the belt. What’s a hundred miles between allies? What’s a few dozen dead troops?”
“He sure gets jolly when it comes to the grim stuff,” Nora mutters.
Grim as it may be, this will do for safe ground. It’s the past, but not my past. Just a page I remember from some moldy history book. The mass migrations followed by the bizarre border adjustments, the lunatic logic that if enough Americans lived there, it must be America. The nation creeping northward, racing to reabsorb its fleeing populace until an exasperated Canada finally drew the line.
I see that line on the horizon. It cuts across Ontario’s fallow farmlands like an old scar.
“Daddy?” Sprout says, blinking groggily as she wanders up the aisle. “Is that a wall like in Mexico?”
“It sure is, little girl,” he replies with morbid amusement. “Our prison was an international effort. We built the floor, Canada built the ceiling.” He lowers the intercom and looks back at his daughter through the doorway. “But it’s different this time. This time we’re going over it.”
Sprout smiles, then yawns, and plops into a seat near the front. She rubs the eye under the patch and closes them both.
Julie emerges from the restroom. The shadow I glimpsed in her eyes has spread to her face; her jaw is set with quiet determination—to do what?
“Abram,” she says.
He ignores her. “As we approach our destination, please return to your seats. All electronic devices—”
“Abram.” Julie steps into the cockpit doorway.
Silence, then a sigh. “What.”
“Are you sure we can cross the wall? My family tried the Washington gate once and the automation almost gunned us down.”
“When was this?”
“About seven years ago?”
“That’s about when their military collapsed. No way the wall is still online, and it never had anti-aircraft anyway. It was more of a symbol than a real fortification.”
I glance out the window. The wall is close enough to make out the giant red maple leaves painted along its length like stop signs. How did we provoke our mild neighbor to such a mad act? I suppose even the coolest heads have their limits.
“I was thinking . . . ,” Julie says, “maybe we should check it out on foot first. To make sure it’s safe.”
Abram glances back at her with raised eyebrows. “Never thought I’d hear you advise caution.”
“And you’re suddenly a risk taker?”
“What can I say, you’ve inspired me. Or driven me insane.”
“Abram.” I can’t see either of their faces, but I can see Julie’s grip on the doorframe tightening. “I think we should turn around. Land in Detroit and take the bikes to check out the wall.”
“Land in Detroit?” He laughs. “You want me to add two hundred miles to our flight and spend a whole day on the road just for some pointless recon?”
“We can check the airport for fuel while we’re there. And besides . . .” She hesitates, then pushes ahead. “You saw the notes in the cabin. ‘Facilities’ in Detroit. We need to know what they’re—”
“No we fucking don’t,” he cuts her off. “That’s got nothing to do with us.”
“It’s got everything to do with us!” Julie snaps, her voice rising. “They’re trying to turn this country into some kind of—”
“I thought you were done with this country.” His matter-of-fact tone stops her short. “I thought you wanted to leave.”
Her fingers tremble on the doorframe, but she’s silent.
Abram lets the moment hang while he checks his instruments. “We’re going to cross the wall at eight thousand feet. Nothing’s going to get us. But okay, just to be safe . . .”
He flips a switch, and the seat belt lights blink on.
“. . . there.”
I get out of my seat, watching Julie nervously. She takes a step into the cockpit, and I brace to intervene. But the explosion doesn’t come.
“Abram, listen to me.” There’s no anger. Her voice is low and tremulous. Desperate. “I need to go to Detroit.”
I lean in, trying to catch a glimpse of her face in the cockpit mirror.
“It’s important to me.”
Abram twists around, his brows furrowed. “Why?”
I can’t quite see the mirror. But as I lean in closer, hoping Julie’s face will offer some clue to the puzzle inside her . . . I see something else. Something more dangerous than her temper, than her dreams, than her secrets or mine.
A flash on the border wall. A bright spot rising.
“Uhh?” I blurt; I can’t find any words; I thrust my a
rm between Abram and Julie and point out the window.
They look.
“Abram?” Julie shouts.
“No,” he says in a tone of indignant disbelief, like there must be some mistake.
The object streaks up from the wall and a ball of fire blooms in the distance. A few seconds later, the sound hits: a low boom that I can feel in the floor.
“What the fuck was that?” Nora says, joining the bottleneck at the front of the plane. Two more glowing specks rise from the wall and explode, closer now. The three clouds of smoke float in the air like a bouquet of black roses, their white stems reaching down toward earth. The first is vertical, the second slightly curved; the third is pointing straight toward us.
“Daddy what’s happening?” Sprout cries.
“Stay in your seat, Murasaki!”
Something screams past the windows and I catch a split-second glimpse of the anti-aircraft defenses the wall supposedly doesn’t have: a blue cylinder with pointy fins and a red nose cone, like a child’s toy rocket. It explodes somewhere overhead, shoving the plane downward.
“Gray River,” M says dreamily. His face is pressed against the window, staring up at the lingering cloud of fire. “Magnum XLs.”
“What?” Abram shouts, craning his neck toward M.
“Old-fashioned heat seekers.”
“Why are they missing us?” Nora asks with a cringe, as if asking will break the spell.
“Tuned for fighter engines. We’re too cold.”
“So we’ll get through,” Abram declares with desperate confidence. “They’ll miss us and we’ll get through.”
M’s eyes widen. “Maybe, but—”
“Are you out of your mind?” Nora shrieks. “Turn around!”
Abram stares grimly ahead, his knuckles white on the controls.
“Turn around,” Julie says. “We can find somewhere else.”
“Like Iceland?” Abram snaps. “Like fucking Atlantis?” His voice trembles with a strange blend of rage and fear. “There’s nowhere else. There’s no more time. We’re in the mouth and it’s closing.”
Another flash from the wall.
“Abram, for Christ’s sake!” Julie says, grabbing the back of his seat. “Turn around!”