The Settlers

by Jason Gurley

  As the Earth slides beneath them, Gretchen tells Emil a story.

  Her name was Molly, she says. We found each other in high school, just a few years before I moved to Cassiopeia with my sister and mother. That we found each other seems the best way to put it, though I don't think either of us knew we were searching for each other. I still remember the day that she saw me for the first time. That's how it happened. She saw me. I didn't see her.

  Emil just listens.

  I'd had a terrible fight with my mother that morning, Gretchen continues. I don't remember what it was about. That's how it always works, you know. You remember the fight, but you forget the reason for it. I had called my mother a horrible, terrible name. I'd been doing that a lot lately. I guess that day, Mother had had enough, and she told me that I was a bitch. She didn't mean it. We both knew that she didn't. After she said it, she got this horrified look on her face, and she started to cry. She came to me, trying to apologize, but I knew how much it would hurt her if I just ran, so that's what I did. I didn't give her the chance to make it right, even though I knew it wasn't really her fault.

  Molly was new -- isn't that the way these stories always go? She was new, and she was nervous. My school was in Texas, in the part of Houston that hadn't been submerged yet. She was from somewhere inland. Minnesota, I think. Someplace that used to be cold, but wasn't anymore. And I never could figure out -- why would you move from safe ground to the new coast? Usually everybody was doing the opposite. I lost a lot of friends in those years. Most of them moved to places like Montana, where they were safe.

  I lived in Montana, Emil says. Butte.

  I've never been, Gretchen says.

  Go on.

  Molly saw me in the library, standing in a corner, just pressing my head against the brick. I used to do things like that to myself back then. Some girls would cut themselves, but me, I liked to find unconventional ways to hurt myself. The brick was pretty rough, and I wasn't, so when Molly came up and asked if I was okay, when I turned to look at her, there were these thin lines of blood coming out of my forehead and dripping down my face. What can I say? I was a dramatic child. But look, you can still see the rough patch on my forehead.

  Emil tilts his head to see. Your hair is in the way.

  Gretchen wiggles her arms. I'm pretty well immobilized here, she says.

  Emil sweeps her hair back with his palm. Oh, yes. I see it. That must have hurt.

  I don't remember. But Molly was unflappable. She just pulled a tissue from her bag and said, You probably know already, but you're bleeding a little. A little! I had blood on my shirt, my cheeks, my nose. And there she was with a tissue, this scared new girl who just -- she found me. And I started to cry, all snotted-out and gross.

  What did Molly do? Emil asks.

  She took me to the bathroom and she cleaned me up, Gretchen says. And that was sort of the beginning of what was going to be something wonderful.

  Going to be?

  Well, when you fall in love on a fucked-up planet, sometimes bad things happen at the wrong times, Gretchen says. Molly and I never got to so much as hold hands. We talked for hours in the library, and she told me about her favorite books, and I told her books were silly, and so she read some of her favorite parts to me. She liked this one book about Mars, it had all these little stories about people moving to Mars. I still read it every year, just to remember her a little.

  It sounds familiar, Emil says.

  You think? Gretchen says.

  What happened to Molly?

  She let me walk her home that afternoon. She didn't know the area yet. And we talked all the way there, and when we got to her building, she invited me to her room, and we talked until her father told me I had to go home so they could eat. Sometimes I wish I had stayed, but I went home to my mother and my sister, and Molly sat down to eat dinner with her family, and they all died.

  What was it?

  The stupidest thing, Gretchen says. They were renting in one of the neighborhoods that was probably going to be next to go. You have to remember, in those days, the rain was practically constant, and a lot of places flooded, and a lot of buildings got insane amounts of water damage. And I guess what happened with their building was that there was a weak spot in the sub-basement, and nobody knew, but all of the rain had basically broken through, and for weeks the basement was just filling up with mud and water and sludge, and then a few things just gave out, and the whole apartment building just fell inward on itself.

  She died, Emil says.

  She died. So did her father, and whoever else was in her family. I didn't meet them all. Everybody else in the building died, too. That wasn't uncommon in those days. No survivors. Nobody to rescue. You remember how it was.

  Well, I was in Montana. It was a little different there, Emil says. But I remember a lot of the coastal states stopped trying to pull people out when things like that were happening.

  Yes, Gretchen says. It happened almost every day. Nobody can rescue that many people.

  So you lost her, he says. What a tragedy. Do you think she felt --

  The same way? Gretchen asks. I hope so. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure I've romanticized this memory of this one day. But she was the one. Do you know?

  Emil nods. I know.

  And I guess I've always been content to live without replacing her, Gretchen says.

  Do you regret that now?

  Gretchen considers this. You know, I don't think I do.

  Good, Emil says. Regrets are hell.

  You say that like a man who has a few, Gretchen says.

  I don't know any men who don't, Emil says.

  Tell me one, Gretchen says.

  Emil shifts on the glass floor. I couldn't. What a waste of your last --

  He stops. I'm sorry.

  Don't be, Gretchen says. I've nothing to say, really. Tell me a story.

  A story, Emil says.

  Gretchen smiles. Tell me the last bedtime story I'll ever hear.

  So he does.

  Isona

  I am not so good at telling stories, but I will tell you this one.

  When I was a boy, my father moved my family to America. It is funny to start my story like this. It sounds like a very old story, but it is not. I am not quite that old.

  My father could build things. Applications and computers and such. Things I never learned, despite our home being a wreck of devices and our dinner conversation being about things like software platforms and databases. But he was an impatient man, and he didn't do his research, and he moved us to Montana instead of to California, where there were jobs for people like him.

  He spent all of our money getting us to America, and then he didn't have enough to get us to California. He couldn't find a job doing what he loved to do, so he did what all parents do when they must. He took a job that meant nothing to him, and then took two more on top of that. He waited tables, and he carried luggage. And at night he continued to write programs. He was very tired all of the time, my father. I didn't see him very much.

  When I was thirteen years old, my father created an application that would find a pen pal for you. He told me that he felt very bad that he was always busy, so he had made this application just for me, so that I might find some friends. I wasn't making friends in Montana. My accent was troublesome, and I thought that the children there were boring. They liked guns, and I liked books.

  I didn't want to use this program that he made. I was angry with him, like boys are. I understand now what he was trying to do, but oh, what an ungrateful shit I was then.

  But then he died.

  He died in the stupidest way, and left me alone.

  Remember, my father was tired all the time. He would sleep two or three hours at night, and then work, work, work. I know now that it was all to keep me in good clothes and stuffed with food, but at the time, I really didn't like him. He would come home from work, and he would go into the corner of our little apartment and keep working. And I would fall as
leep in my sleeping bag listening to the clack, clack, clack of his computer keys. To this day, I hate that sound.

  When I was thirteen I thought that my father was so in love with his work that he would work all day, then come home and work, work some more. I thought he loved it more than me. And he did love it, but not that much. I didn't understand that he would come home and try to build these applications that might make him a wealthy man.

  He only wanted to give me opportunities. He was like any immigrant father in that respect.

  I only gave him grief.

  He died because he was tired. He woke at four in the morning to go to work at one of his jobs -- he kept adding new ones and discarding other ones, and I don't know which one he was going to that morning. But he got up, dressed, kissed me goodbye, and drove to work on the wrong side of the road. He had forgotten, maybe, that he was in America. It was so early that there was almost nobody on the road, but still my father drove into them. And he died.

  I was a petulant boy. When my father kissed me each morning, I was awake, but I would pretend to be asleep. I would hate the way his whiskers poked me. I would fill myself with anger until my body was so stiff that I woke up with cramps and old-man posture.

  I wish I had kissed him back that day.

  When he died, I was given to the state, and sent to live with several families, a different one every few months. None of them wanted to keep me. I was a very challenging foster child, I suppose. I was always closing myself away in rooms, always sticking my nose into books. I didn't sleep well, or often. I had nightmares. I cried an awful lot. It's not easy, I guess, for a family to adopt a teenager who is having a perpetual nervous breakdown.

  So I was sent from one home to the next to the next. And one family had another little boy, and this little boy was a snoop and a jackass. All of my possessions in the world were inside a single box. One afternoon I returned home from school, and the contents of my box were strewn all over the house. I found my favorite book in the oven.

  But that little boy did me the greatest favor of all.

  Because one of the items in the box was my father's tablet computer. And the boy, this little bastard, he cracked the screen, and I was so upset. I was so overwhelmingly upset that I was shaking and unable to cry. I was full of regret then, remember, and so my father's computer was at once precious and anathema to me.

  I turned it on to make sure that it was not broken, and it wasn't.

  And there on the screen was the application that my father had made for me.

  Gretchen says, Can you take me down from this harness?

  Yes, Emil says. Are you okay?

  Yes, I think so, Gretchen says. It's just that all the blood rushes to your face after a while.

  Emil pulls the tether until Gretchen is upright, then releases her feet.

  Ooh, she says. Tingly.

  She stands up, knees a little shaky.

  Emil sits back down.

  Go on, Gretchen says. I'm just going to walk until my legs wake up right. What happened after that?

  What happened was I started crying.

  My father, he would always leave these little notes for me where only I would notice them. Like when we first moved to Montana, I saw this movie where these two people were in love, but one of them worked for an evil empire, and the other one was part of the rebellion. And all of these awful things happened between those two groups, but these two people, they would leave notes for each other in the form of symbols. A circle meant I'm okay. A circle with a dot in it was I'm hurt. Things like that.

  And so my father would do things like that.

  When the application loaded, there was a startup screen that was pretty crude. The app was called Pen Me. It was a play on words, right, but my father was always bad at English, so while the intention was good, it sort of didn't work all that well. But anyway, right there on the screen, in plain sight, was a little circle with three dots in it.

  Three dots meant I love you.

  So that's why I cried. My father was gone, but it was like he was my own pen pal from beyond the grave. That's heavy and melodramatic, maybe, but that's how it felt to me at thirteen.

  Was the program any good? Gretchen asks.

  She sits down next to Emil and rests her head on his shoulder. Her white hair bows into his face a little, but it smells nice, and he doesn't mind. He puts an arm around her without thinking.

  Gretchen leans into him a little more. That's nice, she says.

  Emil clears his throat.

  The application was terrible, he says.

  Gretchen laughs. Aw. That's too bad.

  But, Emil says. It worked.

  My father had created an application that nobody wanted. He didn't realize this, not entirely. The world had become so connected that there was no patience for an outdated model of correspondence. People had devices in their pockets that they could use to talk to anybody, anytime they wanted. Who needed a pen pal?

  But he didn't know any better. He thought that it might be interesting to take away immediacy. I think that he thought if you had to wait for a very long time to receive a message from someone, perhaps when you responded, you would take more care with your words, and write things of greater value. So in a sense, I think he was a traditionalist. He hoped to bring the old ways into the new world, and to wring more pleasure out of this new world.

  It didn't work, though. I searched and searched through the application, looking for other people who were using it, but there was nobody. I thought it was broken. I was paging through the directory, looking for other users, but everybody in the system was inactive.

  Except for one person.

  Their username was Icarus.

  In this application, you could select a person to write to, and they would become your pen pal forever. You could never unchoose a person, and you could never choose another person. You became inextricably linked through my father's limited vision of how people would be connected.

  There was nobody else to select, so I chose Icarus.

  Did you write to Icarus? Gretchen asks.

  I did, Emil says.

  Did he write back?

  He didn't.

  That's too bad, Gretchen says.

  But she did.

  I had written a letter that was too personal for any pen pal. I think I had assumed that Icarus, whoever he was, would certainly not be actively participating in this lonely world my father had created. So while I began writing to Icarus, I found myself writing to my father instead. I wrote to him about all of the things that had transpired since the morning he died. I told him about my foster families, about school, about how I was just like him these days, how I couldn't sleep.

  I sent the letter without thinking much about it, and then I skipped dinner with my foster family and just went to bed.

  I forgot all about the letter, but I had rediscovered my father's old tablet computer, and I started to carry it with me everywhere. I did homework on it. I read books. I even slept with it under my pillow. It was all that was left of him, and it was precious to me.

  Weeks must have passed before I got a letter from Icarus. By then, I'd completely forgotten writing the letter, and it all came back in a rush. I was embarrassed. What would this boy think of me? I'd spilled my guts to a stranger, but pretended that I was writing to my dad.

  I was afraid to open the letter, but I did.

  Dear Emil,

  I was very pleased to receive your letter. I didn't think there were any other pen pals left in the world. Your letter arrived during a very trying week for me, so it was very nice to feel that there was something special for me. Someone chose to write me! Someone was interested in me!

  As I read your letter I realized that my terrible week was not so terrible. I am so sorry about your father. (I think maybe you were writing to me by mistake. It didn't seem like you were that interested in who you were writing, just that writing what you had to write was very important. That's a big logical leap for me
to make, so I'm sorry if I'm wrong!)

  In any case, I hope we can still be pen pals anyway. I'd like very much to know that you are okay and feeling better, and that there are some happy things in your life despite all of the things that make you sad.

  Some happy things we can talk about:

  What is your middle name?

  What color are your eyes?

  Do you have a pet?

  Have you ever seen a shooting star?

  Do you like clowns? (They scare me.)

  Please, please write back!

  Your new friend,

  Isona

  Isona, Gretchen whispers. Pretty.

  Her name was Isona Carus, Emil says. I. Carus. Icarus. I had just assumed.

  Gretchen nods. Did you write her?

  I did, for many, many years.

  That's lovely. Did you meet?

  We did more than that, Emil says.

  Isona and I once counted how many letters we had written to each other. Altogether there were two thousand or so. When we started, I was thirteen years old, and she was sixteen. I lived in Butte, Montana, and she lived in Veria, Greece. I was a foster child, and she worked for her uncle in a cotton mill. Her world seemed far more real than my own. She seemed older, more experienced. I was just an immigrant child owned by the government, rented out to strange families who wanted to feel good about themselves.

  But we wrote and wrote. She wrote to me about college, and I wrote about high school and my first after-school job, shelving books at a public library. She wrote about picking cotton seeds out of her clothing each night, and I told her about moving into a new foster home and sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.

  We didn't meet until Isona was twenty-eight, and I was twenty-five. She was a college graduate, and had moved to Athens. She was a research assistant at a university, and I was starting medical school very late. She had encouraged me to do that. It was Isona who made me feel vital, like more than an orphan.