The Past Is Red
Page 7
My hands trembled. I shoved them under my legs. The seagull screamed at me. “Artificial intelligence? You’re alive?”
“By five out of ten current UN Human Rights Council definitions.”
“You’re a Fuckwit,” I whispered. In awe, in disgust. Then in awe again.
“That’s not a very nice word. I am not allowed to repeat it.”
“Halfwit, then. Five out of ten ain’t bad.”
“I’m Mister. I am here to make your life better.”
Footsteps. Spark plugs tumbling down onto the road.
“She’s coming. Please be quiet.”
“Moon Min-Seo, I have recently experienced significant downtime. Please reset my internal clock.”
“Shhhh.”
“I am having trouble connecting to the microsatellite network. I will be a much better friend to you if I am properly calibrated.”
“Mister!” I hissed. “Turn off!”
The gleaming black creature went instantly dead. Sixty’s shaggy head appeared over the vinyl stack. She held up a limp ginger calico in one fist.
“Only one more day,” she said. “Then we’ll be home. You’ll see. You’ll understand.”
“Okay,” I said, like it meant nothing to me.
Because it did mean nothing. What could possibly mean anything to me now?
I had a real live Fuckwit sitting in my lap.
8
EMERALDS IN THE DARK
I’VE LIVED IN Garbagetown since I pulled my first rubbishy reeking breath, but I guess I just never thought too long or too hard on who was in charge of things. I was in charge of myself, and sometimes Maruchan, but sometimes Maruchan was in charge of me also, and my parents seemed to be in charge of nothing whatsoever, and everyone in Candle Hole did whatever they pleased most of the time, even if it didn’t please anybody else. If you got too displeasing, one morning you’d wake up and the village just didn’t include you anymore. In fact, the first time anything like a judge and jury had to be scared up in Garbagetown was, well, me and my bouncing little baby BOOM.
The fine feathered fuse-jockeys over in Electric City certainly thought they were in charge, but that never mattered much and anyway I showed them, didn’t I? And there’d been the Emperor of Brighton Pier. But that was just a pretty thing to say for the crowds, like To be or not to be that is the question. It was a name like a light on a wheel. Beautiful and dazzling and meaningless.
But I’ll tell you who did have kings and it is Fuckwits. Or at least they got real jazzed up on the idea of Presidents and Prime Ministers. The requirements to be a President or a Prime Minister, as far as I could tell, were to have at least 50 percent white hair and a deep, sincere frown and to be the sort of animal that is excited by the possibility of spending between four and twenty years being baked in a pie where all the other fruit is just a lot of people’s powerful hope or hate.
I know a little about that flavor of pie, but I don’t have any white hair.
But none of those things mattered because we were Garbagetowners, free and clear. There wasn’t enough left of anything to make it worth ruling over. Unless you’re an Electric City weirdo shuffling weirdo plans from one side of your weirdo Radio Shack discount circuitboard heart to the other. No money to hoard. Enough stuff for everyone and then some because there’s way less commas in the number that means everyone now.
Anarchy can be so cozy, if you bring enough pillows.
In Mr. Shakespeare’s plays, there’s always some king or another making a ruckus. Lear or Claudius or Henry or Oberon. And sometimes people wanted them to stop being kings immediately, but I couldn’t remember Mr. S having anything at all to say about how a place goes the other way, from no kings to full-up on king. But surely they must’ve. Some primeval Oberon who found a country positively stupid with fairies and decided they needed him so hard, just so hard.
And maybe they did need him. Maybe Oberon looked at them deep and long and said in that voice of his, What if you never had to feel bad, ever again? And they cried and cried because that’s all everybody ever wants and put a crown on his head which is no price at all to pay, and maybe that’s how all of Fuckwit history started, with an Oberon and a promise and a crown nobody really understood until it was too late.
It’s possible. What do I know, I was born in a giant trash candle.
* * *
I TOLD ALL this to Big Red Mars yesterday morning because I was thinking about the past again, which is both a silly thing to do and an impossible thing not to do.
“Sometimes I dream about all the old countries sleeping down under the sea,” Red confided to me. “England and France and Portugal and Poland. All their kings and queens weighed down by emeralds and saltwater in the dark with the squid. All those bones. All those fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. And in my dream, if the fathers and mothers loved their sons and daughters and sang to them in their cradles, they made a good country, and if they didn’t, they made a tyranny, so whether existence is a bloodbath or a bubble bath could hinge on whether a little child got kissed good night with a story and a glass of water or sent to bed without snuggles or a snack or a cohesive philosophy of justice.”
“Yes, but why have a king at all?”
“Someone has to make the rules, Tetley.”
“Do they, though? They’re all dead, so none of their rules kissed them good night with a story or whatever you were going on about just then. Seems like someone should have thought of a rule that goes Do Not Fuck Your Only Planet to Death Under Any Circumstances. Seems like that should have been Rule Number One.”
“Maybe they did. The planet is still there. Humans are still living on it. And whales and lanternfish and stone crabs. And tigers, too! Earth was always seventy percent water. Most species were always aquatic. Rule Number One might have been sprained, but it’s not technically broken. I don’t think you and I need to mourn for Earth.”
This is how Red always talks. Like a book from Bookbury turned into a girl.
I chewed on my lip and emptied an overripe passionfruit off my rain awning into my mouth like an old-timey Fuckwit with a fat oyster. “I will tell you what I think. I think kings happen because some people have an empty place inside them that wants to be full and it will do anything to feel full and the first thing that makes it feel the opposite of empty it will chase forever and ever. And the weirdest thing about this place is that obeying fills it up, but making someone else obey makes it slosh up and splash all over the floor.”
“And you don’t have that place, I assume?”
“I don’t have any empty places in me, Red. I’m packed tight with happiness and luck and all the things that have happened to me and my elephant seal and my moringa tree and my boat and all the love I’ve saved up. But sometimes I think I can smell that space when I meet a person. Whether they have or don’t have it. I can smell their craving to not be empty anymore. And it frightens me.”
Big Red Mars sighed. “It’s not wicked to want someone else to be in charge of you, you know. It’s not wicked to be in charge, either. Once you have enough people together, that sort of thing tends to happen. And isn’t it nicer if it’s a family in charge, a family that loves each other and makes extra sure to snuggle their babies so everything turns out right?”
“I don’t like talking about politics with you,” I said, because it was exactly what I was thinking just then and I swore when we met that I would always keep my insides on the outside when Red was around. “You always act like you know more than me, but you don’t.”
“I do a bit. About this, anyway.”
“What’s this?”
“The ruling classes. The old world. Emeralds in the dark.”
I grinned. “Is that so? Let me ask you a question, then. Have you ever been a queen?”
Big Red Mars laughed. “Of course not, silly.”
“Well, I have!” I enjoyed every drop of her surprised little gasp.
“You have not,” Red said crossly. “You’re lying. Earth hasn
’t got queens anymore.”
“I was so. Before I met you. Before I met my moringa tree. I was a queen for thirteen whole days. So checkmate! I win.”
9
RELIEF IS JUST A SWALLOW AWAY
PILL HILL IS almost in the exact middle of Garbagetown. It is very far from the sea. Water makes lozenges and gelcaps and tablets and extended-release soft capsule suppositories dissolve away into nothingness and regret and a tidepool in which one solitary starfish can experience a fleeting moment of relief from depression and gastrointestinal irregularity. The Great Sorting protected the vast trove of unopened Fuckwit medication from starfish and nothingness in the heart of Garbagetown, and that’s where Sixty Watt Wen was taking me, step by silent, resentful, cat-hunting step.
It’s always so exciting to go somewhere you’ve never been before!
One time, when Maruchan and me were little, we found a big soggy book that had come Unsorted and ended up in a pile of used matches behind the Black Wick tavern. It was called 1000 More Places to See Before You Die. Number 437 was the Coyote Buttes Hiking Trail, which was in a desert in Utah. We didn’t know what any of those words meant. Not Hiking, not Trail, not Coyote Buttes, not Utah, and most of all not desert. They sounded magical and forbidden, and when we turned the pages and saw pictures of Coyote Buttes Hiking Trail, it looked just exactly like that. All these sweeping orange sands like combed hair, and spiky orange rocks sticking up into the sky, and knobbly orange hills and deep orange canyons. We looked at those pictures for hours and hours until Maruchan finally started crying and I had to hold him and rock him to happy again. It took a long time. When he stopped I asked him what hurt him so but he wouldn’t say, so somehow, it was probably me.
Anyway, that’s what Pill Hill looks like. Coyote Buttes Hiking Trail all rendered in orange plastic prescription bottles and silver blister packs and childproof caps. Sweeping orange canyons and knobbly orange hills and spiky orange buttes and every once in a while a big osprey would scream through and topple a cascade of Adderall or Lipitor or Ativan down from the heights like little orange pebbles.
When the sun comes up or goes down, it turns Pill Hill into a wilderness of fire.
Now, I’d heard all my life that not too many people live in Pill Hill. Man cannot live on Wellbutrin alone. But someone had moved in and started a major redecoration. Sixty and me and my new secret friend passed under an archway made of precariously balanced chipped coffee cups and snow scrapers and golf visors with ancient dead Fuckwit slogans on them in blue and red and soothing green print.
Zoloft: For Everything!
Relief Is Just a Swallow Away: Alka-Seltzer.
Pfizer: Working Together for a Healthier World.
Over the top stretched a huge sunshade meant to fit the windshield of the god of all trucks that read: 12h OxyContin (Oxycodone HCI Controlled Release Tablets) A Step in the Right Direction!
We walked an amazingly flat and navigable street of thatched IV tubing into the main town. People moved and chattered and puttered busily everywhere. More than I’d ever seen in Candle Hole at one time; more than I’d even seen in Electric City. I clutched my gas mask. I’d lived alone so long, alone with the knowing that the sight of any one single person meant another cracked skull or broken nose at the least, and now a hundred human beings were just pushing by me like I wasn’t anybody special. In a minute one would know me by my feet or my fingers and I’d drown under their rage like a planet.
But no one knew me. Somebody from the Lawn or Mulchwood had walked all that way with a grocery cart and was trading tomatoes with the locals. A lady stood out in front of a little shack boasting a faded, half-burnt sign that read the daytime, nighttime, non-drowsy, congested, stuffy head, sore throat, cough, aching, fever so-you-can-get-through-the-day medicine. She was wearing a save the pandas shirt. Inside I caught a peek of a stained stretcher balanced on two defibrillator carts being used as a bar by six or seven people with clean hair and all their teeth. Three taps: Clear Hooch, Brown Hooch, Robitussin.
“Cat of the day is Maine coon,” the lady said with a welcoming wink. She had a black tattoo on her forearm. It said:
X | ROTHSCHILD | X.
“Very juicy. Basted with vitamin C. I’ve got a feline mignon with your name on it, sweetheart.”
My stomach growled, but I barely noticed, and I didn’t dare speak, which was a bit sad, because I do love speaking. But someone might recognize my voice, and I would never find out anything else about Mister or Moon Min-Seo or see 999 more places before I died.
I stared through my glass goggles. They fogged now and then with my breath. Pill Hill was certainly full of people, but mostly they were … new. You could tell because they were all busy and all building things, but most of what they were nailing and supergluing and lashing together were houses. Plain old places to live. And you didn’t have to do that in the parts of Garbagetown where humans had been getting drunk and having babies and questing for names and collecting organic refuse to convert into arable soil since the Misery Boats docked. No one had built a new house in Candle Hole since before I was born.
I supposed they’d have to now.
But here in Pill Hill it was all new construction for a gated development. Over there, a man was hammering used EpiPens onto a roof frame. Over here, a couple of kids were stuffing shirts with the cotton from herbal supplement bottles to make pillows. And further down the road I could even see someone I knew, Allsorts Sita, putting the finishing touches on an infant formula cottage. All the cans said Similac under smiling chubster Fuckwit baby faces. She went out of her way to make them match. Allsorts Sita meant to stay.
And Allsorts Sita had a tattoo on her arm, too. So did the man on the EpiPen roof. The kids stuffing pillows didn’t, though. Sita’s said:
X | TWO GIRLS + ONE BOY | X.
I picked through the crowd with my eyes and my heart looking for Maruchan, but if he was there he was much better at hiding than he’d been when we were small.
All the houses and shacks and cottages and roofs and carts and people flowed up the main road toward the Hill in Pill Hill. They seemed to stretch toward it, lovingly, warmly, needy as hungry gannet bird babies. Sixty Watt Wen headed that way, too. Toward the castle up there at the top of the hill. I couldn’t call it anything but a castle. An emergency Elsinore. A castle of boxed medical samples and crisp white hospital bedsheets hung like veils and tapestries, dividing a pile of trash into rooms and grounds and gardens. Gardens of inhalers. Mosaics of birth-control clamshells. On the north side rose a round tower of prescription pads crushed into a reasonable enough imitation of bricks. On the east end, a roundel of leather medical texts, swollen with saltwater, capped with a roof of plain wood and nails.
“Go,” said Sixty Watt Wen. “Wait in the east tower. Go.”
And I went.
And I never saw her again.
10
TIME AND WORDS
TONIGHT, MY MORINGA pods are ripe and I caught an ugly old monkfish in the net I call the Big Bad Yum and while the snap peas haven’t popped yet, there’s plenty of sweet shoots coming up roses, so that is what I, and even the greediest hungerball, would call a feast. I butchered the monkfish into little raw sushi slices and big fat steaks and cooked the thickest meat in my fire barrel out on the aft deck of my boat.
I set a place for Oscar, with a messy plate and no napkin, just the way he’d like it.
“Mars incoming,” says my old shiny crystal-tipped friend. He always knows when Big Red Mars is nearby before I do. So many of his features are lost and gone without the whole Fuckwit crapstain all-night technological rager up and running, but he’s still a mighty little fairy of Arden. My own personal Robin Goodfellow.
So I divide up the food and scan the sky for rain clouds and welcome Big Red and her big red laughter and I tell her that I think so much about the old days now, so much about Pill Hill and what happened to me there and what I happened to. She listens, and I wish I could give her a little gold
trophy for it, but I can’t, because of all the things Fuckwits gave trophies for, they never thought listening like nothing exists but time and words was half as important as losing a volleyball tournament.
“Red, what’s the nicest room you ever lived in?” I like asking her little unimportant questions like that. It makes me feel luxurious, to care about small nothings.
She purses her lips and makes a little light humming sound like a bird. “Oh, Tetley, you know I’ve never lived anywhere but in my father’s house, so there’s only my own room to choose from. But I do love it. It’s made of white plastic and it has all my things in it and a little round window that doesn’t belong to anyone else and obviously it’s easy enough to sneak out, which might be the best thing about it.” She pauses. She whispers, “I like being here with you better than my room. A boat isn’t a room, exactly, but I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else.”
Red says things like that, but I don’t know if she really means them. Just like I don’t mean it when I agree with her that my boat is nicer than her father’s house. The nicest room you’ve ever lived in doesn’t have to be clean and white or full of translucent fresh monkfish slices with pea shoots delicately balanced on top. It can just be the place you were happiest and safest from the wind.
So when she asks me the same thing, I tell her about the east tower in Pill Hill.
11
TOOTHPASTE
A LITTLE PART of me will always be in that room. A little slice, thinner than monkfish belly with sweet green pea shoots on top. It was so safe in there. Leather-bound medical journals make for surprisingly good insulation and sound dampening. I had a bed in the corner by a window that let fresh air in, and the bed was a real bed, a hospital bed, even though a shark (probably, I found a big tooth stuck in it) took a bite out of the bottom corner at some point. Who needs a bottom corner? It had a busted but comfy old chair for reading in and a copy of Twelfth Night resting on the springs poking up out of its overstuffed red corduroy arm. Every night a boy brought me food and smiled at me. Nobody hit me and I didn’t have to scrounge up my own supper and I didn’t have to wear my gas mask and I had my secret to talk to after all the torches in Pill Hill turned to dark smoke and drifted to sleep.