Midnight at the Electric

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  As they ate popcorn and watched TV, Adri was quiet, but not unhappy, her knees up to her chin and her arms folded around them. D’Angelo and Alexa were flirting, and Saba had already established herself as the practical one—reminding them that they had to be up at 4:30 the next morning and that she was going to bed at 12:01. Everyone went out of their way to include Adri, trying to get her to puff a cigar, fixing her a drink.

  The night devolved after that, into laughter (even, a few times, hers) and a few strange confessions. Saba admitted that she was terrified of flying, and everyone found that hilarious. D’Angelo admitted he’d started studying for the Expeditions requirements in fifth grade, to try to impress a girl. Adri didn’t reveal anything about herself, but she also didn’t walk away.

  Sitting there, she felt a part of them. And she found that, the more they talked about what was coming, the more she wanted to be. She wanted to go to Mars, as badly as she ever had. In the fear of going, it was sometimes easy to forget it.

  As they waited for the moment the ball would drop, the TV showed footage of celebrations that had happened all over the world already: in Sydney, Tokyo, Moscow.

  “Next time we watch this,” Saba said, “it’ll be like—there they are on that other planet, celebrating New Year’s. It won’t be our New Year anymore. Doesn’t that feel crazy?”

  Everyone was quiet for a long time.

  “Earth,” Alexa finally said. “It’s not that great anyway.” And they all smiled sadly. Because, of course, it was everything.

  Pulling into Canaan in the back of a private car, Adri’s heart lifted the closer they got to the farm. She was eager and excited to see Lily, more eager than she would have thought.

  Turning into the driveway, she could see Galapagos craning her neck and then launching into her version of a run, which was really a slow walk. By the time she climbed out of the cab, the tortoise had just made it past the edge of the pond toward her. Adri climbed over the leaning fence and knelt next to her, scratching her neck. Galapagos rolled her eyes, luxuriating. “I missed you too, you inscrutable little weirdo. Aren’t you cold?”

  Lily was in the kitchen, bent under the sink, sniffling and rubbing her sleeve along the bottom of her nose, which was unlike her, her hair messy and unwashed. When Adri said hello she thwapped her head against the cabinet, and then leaned back to peer up at her.

  “Damn pipe is broken,” she said, by way of explanation and hello.

  Adri gazed around. There were dishes piled in the sink. It was unbearably hot, and when she looked at the thermostat, the heat had been turned up to ninety-six degrees.

  Adri turned it down as Lily came to sit at the table.

  “How was your trip?” she asked.

  “It was good,” Adri said uncertainly.

  “Well that’s good.” Lily gazed around at the kitchen as if she didn’t want to meet Adri’s eyes.

  Adri sat down across from her, picking at the edges of the table, unsure what she was supposed to do.

  “Have you been okay here?” she asked.

  Lily gazed at her for a few minutes sheepishly, then nodded.

  Adri unpacked and showered quickly so she could make it back down to Lily. But she couldn’t find her in the kitchen or the living room.

  She went back upstairs to look in her bedroom, didn’t find her there, and then, just as she was about to leave, caught a glimpse of her out the window.

  Lily was standing next to Galapagos in the pasture, petting the tortoise’s head and looking around. She’d brought out a pile of blankets that lay in a lump beside them.

  Adri hurried outside and crossed the grass toward her.

  “Lily, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I just thought she might be cold,” Lily said.

  Adri looked down at the blankets, then at Lily. Lily folded her hands together at her waist, studying them, and then glanced up at her.

  “I don’t remember where I am. Can you help me?” she asked. “Can you call a doctor?”

  CHAPTER 9

  After they sat in triage for half an hour, a nurse admitted Lily and brought her into a room in the back of the small hospital. Adri excused herself while Lily was changed into a gown and a doctor came in to examine her.

  When she entered the room again, Lily was back in her clothes and lying on top of the white sheets under the yellowish glow of the ceiling lights.

  “Where’s your gown?”

  “I hate those things. I changed back.”

  “But you’re not supposed to.”

  “What are they going to do to me? Put me in jail?”

  Adri was tempted to touch her arm as she approached her but instead sat on a chair beside her.

  “So what happened?” she asked.

  Lily laughed. “I got old, that’s what happened.”

  “My housemate’s grandma lived to be a hundred and twenty-two,” Adri offered.

  “Well la-di-da for her.”

  “Seriously, can you describe what happened?”

  Lily smiled at her. “I am serious. I’m old. Things just give out. They can call it dementia or whatever else, but the condition is really just being a human for too long.”

  “I’m sorry, Lily.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Geez. It’s the toll you pay for riding. You know? They’ve cured a lot of things. Just not my brain. It’s like molasses swamp in there.”

  Adri didn’t know. She didn’t know, now, if she’d ever have to pay the toll. Her life would stretch on and on. And Lily had missed that boat. And it seemed horribly unfair.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Lily finally said. “And I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  Lily chewed on her bottom lip thoughtfully, frowning at the horrible ceiling tiles above her. “Maybe we did make some big mistakes, us older people. And now you have to pay. Maybe you were right when you said I could have done things better.”

  “I didn’t say . . .”

  “I . . . I don’t think most of us were trying to ruin anything.” Lily sighed. “The longer I live,” she looked up at the ceiling, “the more I think our big mistakes are not about having bad intentions, but just not paying attention. Just bumbling along, a little self-absorbed.” Lily looked thoughtful for a moment. “Plus a few major assholes, I guess.”

  She looked up at Adri. “I’m sorry to say I think you’ll make just as many mistakes as I did. Just different mistakes.”

  “I have to hope for more than that,” Adri said.

  “Yeah, of course.” Lily reached for a cup of water on her bedside table and took a sip, then laid it down, and laid back again.

  “You know,” she said softly, with a tiny hint of a sad smile. “I envy you. I’m happy for you; I’d give you anything I had if I could, but I envy you.” She smiled. “You’ll go up into the sky and you’ll never come back down, it’s like defying one of the oldest laws in the book. But that’s the way it goes, I guess. You get the future, not me. It’s just . . . I wish I could be in your shoes for a minute or two. Feel the future you feel.” She reached out and patted Adri’s hand. “I’ll tell you a secret. I like to say I’m a has-been, but I don’t really mean it. I feel young too. I feel like this old body has nothing to do with me at all.”

  “I thought they couldn’t pay you a million dollars to live longer.”

  Lily shrugged. “I think that’s what you say when you can’t have something you want, isn’t it? You say you don’t want it in the first place.”

  They were silent for a long while.

  “I don’t know anything about anything, Adri. But I know I love you. And I don’t care if it’s because of evolution or whatever else. I feel it anyway. It doesn’t matter what it’s for.”

  “Why do you love me?” Adri asked, looking anywhere but Lily’s eyes.

  Lily looked surprised by the question. She seemed to realize she didn’t have the perfect answer because she held up her hands sheepishly, tubes dangling.

  “W
hy not?” she finally said.

  She was released two days later. They had dinner then watched a show called Baked! where you could watch someone make desserts from the best restaurants around the world, and then for a few dollars print them out yourself if you had the right feedstocks.

  That night they had a snowstorm. They watched the flakes swirl across the fields, blindingly bright and white. They watched a sitcom with the storm as a backdrop.

  They were halfway through a commercial for Bexie dolls (Adri liked to pop their heads off when she was little but now they were indestructible and could make you chocolate milk and learn all your habits by heart) when Lily said, apropos of nothing, “One more week.” She gave a forced, fake smile.

  It was what Adri had been thinking all day. Her heart pounded as she tried to voice what she’d been thinking since New York, since even before. The first couple times she tried, she couldn’t get it out.

  “What if I could bring you with me?” she finally asked. “To Mars?”

  Lily’s eyes flashed with surprise.

  “Lamont said I could ask for anything. What if I asked for that? He might say yes.”

  Lily stared at her solemnly for a long while, and then smiled. “Who wants to go to Mars?” she teased.

  “Seriously.”

  “Adri, you know they don’t do that. Otherwise everyone would be taking their families with them.” Lily opened her palms on her lap, stared at her fingers for a moment. “Besides, I wouldn’t go. Not even if they let me.”

  There was so much finality in her voice.

  “I could stay with you,” she offered, her voice cracking halfway through. A flutter of fear rose up in her chest, and she didn’t know whether she was scared most of yes or no.

  Lily looked up at her, frowning. A long moment passed, what felt like an eternity, where they teetered there—between one thing and another, each thing a completely different life for both of them. Then finally, Lily spoke.

  “Now, that would kill me. It truly would. If you wanted to take away all my happiness, you could do that.”

  Adri looked down at her hands, embarrassed, relieved, deeply disappointed, still afraid.

  “Your happiness is my happiness. Don’t you understand that, Adri?”

  Adri shook her head. “No.”

  “I hope one day you do,” Lily said.

  They watched the snow a while longer. Adri was going. She would go. This was the moment it was being settled, she realized.

  “Pass the time for me,” Lily finally said. “Tell me about our girls—the two dead sisters. Tell me about the best friends on either side of the Atlantic. Maybe I’ll remember it all better if I hear it from you.”

  So Adri did. She told her about Catherine and Beezie Godspeed and their irresistible farmhand, Ellis. She told her about Lenore Allstock, whose friend in America was not the friend she thought she was.

  And Lily remembered. Adri told the story in such detail that when, two days later, the letter arrived from the Wichita Archives, Lily was as eager to open it as she was.

  She raced inside to give it to Adri and stood with her hands clasped tightly as Adri tore the seal. It was a simple, short form letter.

  We are sorry, but no records match your criteria.

  They stood for a moment.

  “Maybe they didn’t die,” Lily said.

  “Yeah,” Adri said. “Maybe they’re still living in the attic.”

  Lily got that the joke was on her, but she jumped on the train anyway. “Maybe they’re zombies,” she said.

  CHAPTER 10

  The week of launch, Adri drank a special shake four times a day and ate bars laced with electromagnetic proteins in order to have her vitals monitored at all times. She dropped her exercise routine per Lamont’s instructions in order to, as the Institute put it, “rest, revive, spend time with your loved ones, and say good-bye.”

  The launch was Sunday. Wednesday afternoon, Adri began to pack. She piled things onto her bed that would be disastrous to forget. She weighed her belongings on a scale the Center had provided. They were allowed twenty-five pounds for personal items—enough for clothes, a special piece of jewelry maybe or a favorite stuffed animal from childhood, things like that. She was saddened to see—looking at the scale—that she didn’t need to weed anything out.

  Lily was quiet that afternoon. They played cards and mostly hid from the winter weather, watched TV, ate. They did nothing particularly worthy of a person’s last two days on Earth. Time was speeding up, and they couldn’t stop it.

  Late that night they were watching a newscast about some political debate revolving around the observatories on the moon and who owned which territories. Adri was drifting off when Lily suddenly clutched her arm, her fingers digging in like claws.

  “I remember.”

  Adri tried to comprehend her, half asleep, focusing on the room.

  But Lily only dug her fingers in harder. “I remember where the Electric used to be.”

  Neither of them could stand to wait until morning.

  They passed the place three times before they finally stopped; it was so easy to miss in the dark, surrounded by an old metal fence alongside the road. Adri had passed it many times on her runs: an unassuming lot overgrown with weeds and tall grass, with an ancient real estate sign (Commercially Zoned) dangling from the mesh of the fence. Climbing out of the car, Adri’s pulse sped up.

  “They were supposed to build on it, before the 2020 economic reboot,” Lily explained, pulling her coat and hood tightly around her as they stepped over the leaning fence. The whole place was desolate, unprotected from the frigid wind. “I remember coming here as a kid, looking for old coins with a metal detector. We all used to do that. Somebody found a box full of silver dollars once.”

  Lily walked deeper and deeper into the tall grass ahead of her. “Well, where do we start?” she asked. They gazed at each other, shivering, and then Lily looked at the ground around her feet and started beating back the tall grass. After twenty minutes they’d turned up three old Coke cans and a pair of bike tires.

  “We’ll never find anything,” Adri said, knowing they were being ridiculous, because what were they looking for? Still, it was an eerie sensation to stand where the carnival used to be.

  Finally, after another ten more minutes of shivering and searching, Adri sat down at the edge of the field, disappointed.

  What had she expected to find? Skeletons wearing T-shirts with the names Catherine and Beezie? A crystal ball Professor Spero had left behind? It was funny, the things that lasted. Coke cans, glass, wire fences, rocks. The wind tugged at the hair that poked out beneath her hat.

  “It had to be a hoax, huh? The Electric?” she said to Lily, who came and sat down beside her, pulling her teddy bear hat down tightly over her ears.

  “Oh yeah.” Lily nodded. “Of course.”

  She fiddled with the metal top of one of the Coke cans. “They all let each other down.”

  “But people forgive each other. It’s like a dance,” Lily said.

  “I wish I knew how to do that dance,” Adri replied.

  “Oh,” Lily shook her head. “I don’t think it’s that you can’t do it. I think you’re thinking the whole thing is a lose-lose. Like, what if someone actually likes you? That causes all sorts of problems. Then each time you see them, you have to try and keep them. And then even if you manage that, you lose. You end up losing. Even if you go through all the work of accepting someone and occasionally looking like a fool in front of them and then figuring out if they can accept you and you can forgive each other for everything you screw up, you lose them eventually.”

  Lily looked at her, her bear ears flapping in the breeze. “That’s why I think you don’t dance, Adri. I don’t think it’s that you don’t know the steps.”

  Adri held her arms around herself, shivering.

  “Do you think I can change?” she finally asked.

  Lily looked at her, curious and thoughtful. “Well,” she r
eplied, “are you dead?”

  They smiled at each other, a slow unfolding.

  “I’m freezing my boobs off,” Lily said.

  Driving home, Adri thought about what Lily had said at the archives. Maybe she had let herself worry about Catherine and Beezie and Lenore because they couldn’t know or hurt her in return. But she was hurt. By how they had let one another down, and now their stories had vanished.

  She thought about the night Catherine and Ellis had walked the same road home from the Ragbag Fair that they were driving now, trying to forgive each other. Her mind wandered to the wooden box, how Ellis had hidden it under his bed, always scared of things that were long past him. The following morning, it was still on her mind.

  It was just another place she hadn’t looked, nothing promising. There was no reason there’d be anything important there. But the next morning Adri pulled a blanket over her shoulders and walked downstairs and outside.

  She’d never ventured into the old bunkhouse—it was barely a building anymore. She hovered outside the door for a moment, then crossed into the darkness. It smelled like dirt and old hay. There was a wooden frame where a bed used to be, the slats now broken and caved in, the room full of webs and dark corners.

  She made her way through the sticky webs, knelt beside the broken bed, and ran her hands underneath it.

  She felt a slit in the earth, and brushed off the dirt to reveal the two loose planks, and pulled that off to reveal a small space, just a foot wide. The wooden box was still there—though it felt like it shouldn’t be, like something from a dream.

  She opened the top and removed the contents slowly: a framed, grainy, black-and-white photo of a woman and her daughters. She knew them immediately: Beth—stern and proud, Catherine looking off at something to the side—an even-featured, quiet-looking kind of person but restless even as a still life—and Beezie, a hellcat for sure, with an enormous hungry grin on her face like she wanted to swallow whoever was taking the picture. Beneath it, there was a bracelet woven out of straw, half disintegrated. And beneath that, letters. Adri lost her breath.