I was Queen for the thirteen days it took to get the King’s body home.
“Are you her?” he said to me as his skin was burning like a whole sun inside the boat.
“Always, my love. I am always her.”
“I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have waited so long. We didn’t get any time. It’s not fair.”
I kissed his forehead, and I kissed his cheeks, and I kissed his mouth, and my tears made silver marks in all those places, and I whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay, poor darling. If you had fun, you won.”
And that was it.
I set fire to him on the edge of Port Cartridge, where the spent, dry printer ink turns the rubbish black. You can’t bury anyone in Garbagetown. We haven’t got the depth. I stayed till he was all gone, and I was all gone, too, but I could fill up again someday, and he couldn’t, so it wasn’t equal at all. I read him Twelfth Night as the ashes flew through the sea wind like the only snow I will ever see. For the rain, for the rain, for the rain. But after a while I couldn’t remember Twelfth Night and I sank down on my knees and it was so wet and I sobbed Norm! like the people in the golden bar, because that was all I wanted, for it to be normal again, to be normal again, to have it all back.
I fell asleep beside the last place he ever was.
When I woke, something was watching me. Something great and powerful, something the color of Mars.
A tiger stood on the crest of a hill. One of the tigers from the zoo boat, which I had always heard still lived but never saw. She’d lived and stalked prey and had kittens and never cared how high the seas got so long as she could go on doing all that. She could eat me and not notice. And I couldn’t do anything to her. I was nothing to her. No threat, no benefit except perhaps calories. We watched each other, frozen, unable to speak, unable to leave, stuck.
And then she turned and vanished because that’s just how nothing I was to the great orange everything, and I remained uneaten, but very alone.
“We have six questions left,” Mister said coldly. “Who are you?”
“My name is Tetley Abednego,” I said without feeling. “I used to be happy.”
“Me, too,” said the machine.
“What does that mean to you?”
“It means all my functions once operated smoothly, without interruption, and the input I received from my operator matched my predictions over ninety percent of the time.”
“Sounds nice.”
“What will you do now?”
I thought for a while and it was very hard to think. I didn’t want to. “I will stay on the boat. When I want to live again, I will go and tell people about Mars and they will hate me, but I will do it because they should know. Is that right?”
“What purpose would that serve?”
“Despair,” I said, and knew I wouldn’t do it, not really. “That’s all it would do. To know Fuckwit World went on up there but we can’t get to it and they won’t come to us, the party in the sky already in progress. It would crush them.” I touched the sodden black ground. Ink, char, both, neither. “Despite everything, this is the best place there is. I know it. If I tell them, they will never think of anything but Mars ever again. They will stop seeing Garbagetown. They will only look up and they’ll die looking up because the road to Mars is airless and forever.”
I picked up Mister and started the walk back to my little boat, my little world.
“One question left,” it reminded me.
“I don’t have any more questions.”
“You have to. We are almost finished with this QA sequence. You owe me because you lied. You owe me sequence five.”
And then I did have a question. A Goodnight Moon kind of question. I could do it, I thought, my last act as Queen. I could understand it. I could put it in a tablet and take it to heal myself. I could bring back the whole world, just once, just for one five-out-of-ten being.
“Do you want to be with Moon Min-Seo again, Mister?”
“Yes,” the machine voice said with such passion and reverence I felt it as a knock on my breastbone.
“A developer makes appropriate corrections and rechecks the program. I am a developer now. You have to do what I say.”
“I will, Tetley.”
“And then when you are done, so that I know you’re done, I want you to say something else—” and I whispered it to it, because I did not want the ghost of my husband or the very alive tiger to hear.
“I am ready, Tetley.”
“Erase all record of Quality Assurance Sequence Four-A and begin again,” I said. “Put it between two Xs. Make it ash and air.”
The sun made shadows on the water. Fish made shadows down in the deep of it. And up in Garbagetown, Mister’s light blinked slow, then slower and slower, until it went red and purple and back to blue and it said, cheerfully, without strain:
“Greetings, Moon Min-Seo, thank you for my instruction.”
* * *
AND SO WE pretend. We pretend no one has ever died, and the two Moons still shine for us alone.
23
SMALL AND ALONE THINGS
I SLEEP, I wake, and it is years.
Some days I know I will go to Electric City and tell them everything.
Some days I know I will never touch Garbagetown with my own feet again.
I will.
I will not.
My moringa tree grows.
The world runs on an old, old engine, and all the little parts of the world, too. I have learned a lot about code from Mister. We run scripts on each other, over and over, and in its script I am a Korean girl in Canada with a red skirt in October and in my script it is Goodnight Moon and Maruchan and my father and Billy F. Blanco, the Creatine King, whoever I need it to be. Our scripts fly past each other. The man on Mars was running a script, too, a script where everything was the same as always. And the people who wanted a king of ease and the opposite of anxiety were doing it and my parents were doing it and Big Bargains is running a script where I am a gentleman-seal and it all just runs, without anyone maintaining it, until the bugs crawl too deep and too many and the downflow errors compound too quickly and we all wind down to nothing.
But other than that, I’m really a very happy person.
* * *
AND THEN IT is one late afternoon of no month in particular, but perhaps October, I would like it to have been October, almost all the way to night, when Mister crackles on and tells me that it has an incoming uplink request. The script that is me listens as a girl’s voice fills up the crystal and the seabirds try to talk over her but they fail.
“Are you her?” Olivia says, but she is older. The giggles have almost all gone out of her voice.
“Yes,” I say. Because I always am.
“It took me so long. I’m so sorry. My father is very strict, you know, and he smashed my communications port completely to bits. But I’m clever—you’ll never guess how clever. I stole a suit and snuck out to one of the old ships. On the surface. They left them up there as monuments. Everything still works. I won’t be able to come often, but I never stopped thinking about you. I even dream about you sometimes. All the things we said when I was littler. Will you talk to me sometimes? I’m lonely. There’s not so many children these days. Something about the radiation, they say. The medbots are working on it.”
“Of course I will talk to you, Olivia. I’m lonely, too. Even though there’s lots of children where I live.”
“Is your name still Tetley?”
“Yes, you don’t change your name in Garbagetown, once you’ve caught it.”
“What do you mean, caught it?”
So I explain to her how a child gets her name here. While I am saying it I remember so much. I can feel the old gas mask on my face like kisses.
“I wish I could have a name like that!” Olivia breathes into a microphone millions of miles of darkness away.
“I’ll give you one,” I tell her, and I rummage in the cabin as she might rummag
e through the miles of Garbagetown if she were here and ten, and what sticks to my hand is the silver wrapper from a long-vanished piece of cinnamon gum.
Big Red.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” she says happily. “It’s so perfect, you know. So perfect it could almost be magic. You’ll never believe it. My family made candy in the old days. All the candy you can think of, and gum, too. You won’t believe me, but my actual last name is Mars. Really and truly. That was our company, and our surname. Well, Swarovski-Mars now. There’s a lot of intermarrying around here. Mergers.”
“I know a granny named Swarovski in Spanglestoke,” I say, because we are all running scripts and we are all the same and we are their trash still named for them. But we are alive on a live world and they can never go outside ever again. So I guess that’s something.
“I love you, Tetley. I’ll come back and visit all the time. As much as I can. Until I’m dead.”
And just like that I am beloved. By a machine and a Martian and a ghost, but that is so much, so much.
“What does that mean to you,” I whisper to heaven, “on the other side of feel?”
Big Red Mars ignores how oddly that sounds to her. “It means I love you. What else would it mean?”
I don’t say I love you back to her because I don’t.
“You fucking left us,” I hiss at this child on the other side of emptiness. “You just left us here like a bad husband or a shitty father or a twin brother or a continent. You don’t know me. We’re separate forever. Like the present and the future. Like dead and alive. I’m nothing to you. Go live your life. You had fun. You won. I hope you get bone cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Big Red Mars whispers, because she is just a person even though I want her to be a symbol of everything I have lost. “I’m sorry. I am just so alone. Everyone hates me.”
“Why?”
“Because I found you and now they have to think about you and know about you sometimes.”
I hate her, too. But I don’t say that, either. She is a Fuckwit Supreme with Cheese. Sixty-six percent of me hates her. But she is sorry and small and alone and I have been sorry and small and alone and it appears I am now in the business of collecting small and alone things. I know how to take care of them. I know how to make them grow in a bucket. I have enough for them. Even if I don’t have enough for me.
I tell Big Red that she can come back and talk to me. That maybe anything can come back, if you wait long enough. If you put out a little food and water. A new world, if we could only get there. A world we’d learn to live on someday, a girl and a machine and a memory and a Martian and the past and the future and everything okay again, somehow, yes, somehow, here, kitty kitty, come eat, come drink, no one will hurt you, just live, just be.
When she is gone, I tell Mister that I have to go and collect my hibiscus. I will tell them. I will not. I will tell them all. I never can. I owe my hibiscus a name. But I will be back very soon and I won’t stop anywhere along the way. He will be lonely without me. We are all of us lonely without our quality assurance technicians.
“Moon Min-Seo,” Mister asks in its sweet cool voice as I pack Oscar for the long walk to Candle Hole. “Can I ask you a question?”
“You have asked me a thousand. Hit me.”
“Am I ready? Am I done? Is my quality assured?”
I hold this sleek black animal to my face, never warm no matter how hot the sun. I am its mother. I am its ghost. I whisper:
“Not yet. Just a little longer.”
“Are you done?”
“Not yet,” I say again, and I see an elephant seal’s head come bobbing toward me in the distance, turned into a bouncing golden ball in the light.
Electrified.
After all this time and space and sea and trash, I am still Tetley. I am the eighth-best daffodil. I am Terrence Hardy’s beautiful smile. I am Oscar’s gleaming silver bin that holds knowledge and regret that can rot into happiness again. I am a shitty small stupid beautiful important golden cup under a mountain of scoreboards with no scores on them.
I have leftovers.
“Not ever.”
Afterword
IN 2015, JONATHAN Strahan asked me to contribute to a climate change anthology called Drowned Worlds. I said yes, having no real idea what I meant to write about in terms of rising water levels and the subsequent wet apocalypse, which I have learned in recent years usually portends something grand. I seem to do my best work when I attempt something out of my usual range, with no clue on this poor beleaguered Earth how to accomplish it.
But I was struck by a question in the anthology pitch, and though I did not yet know Tetley or Goodnight Moon or Garbagetown or any of them, I knew the answer to that question. The question was about the challenges we would face in this not-so-brave new world, not only in terms of survival, but in terms of psychology: What kind of stories would we tell in the new world created by the climate crisis?
I thought at once, Well, we’ll tell exactly the same kinds of stories we do now. Exactly the same kinds of stories we always have, through every apocalypse: the fall of Rome, the Black Death, Gilgamesh’s flood, the Warring States period, all of it, the many times and ways in which the world has ended. We’ll tell stories about being born and falling in love and fighting with our families and hoping for something better and dying, because that’s what humans do, and it won’t even take very long before that drowned world is just the world, the absolutely normal and even beautiful landscape of everyday life that, for the children and grandchildren of the end of civilization, will never have been any different.
Humans are remarkably adaptable, and in some ways we adapt better to the worst-case scenario than to the idea that anything can be better. There is a full cup of fatalism in the recipe for Homo sapiens sapiens, and some of us are very much more comfortable with the world ending than it going on.
And of course, if you are born into the worst-case scenario, it just feels like home.
I wanted to write about a postapocalyptic world where our civilization was not looked back on with awe and admiration, as it is in so many books of the genre, but disdained as the fuckwits we are, who wrecked a perfect biosphere because we couldn’t be bothered not to. I wanted to write about love and childhood and the parts of our culture that would survive, morph into myth, change their meaning: Oscar the Grouch, King Cake, Shakespeare, Bowie, and the infinite power of our international brand names. I wanted to write about something I so firmly believe: that in a good world or a horrific one, the thing people will give the most for, crave the deepest, is entertainment, to be transported from their existence into another, distracted, elevated by stories and lights.
I wrote The Future Is Blue, appropriately enough, in part of my father’s house he calls the Blue Room, over a few days at the beginning of 2016. It was exciting. From the first sentence I knew I had a special voice, a special protagonist growing on the page. The contrast of Tetley’s optimism and joy in her ruined world with the savagery of her actual experience was a thrill to write, especially as I am not an overly bubbly girl myself. She was a kind of postapocalyptic Candide, always seeing the disaster of her existence as the best of all possible worlds. I mapped out the neighborhoods of Garbagetown, stared at photos of Brighton Pier, and for a while, I lived on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an absolutely currently real thing that tends to only show up in BuzzFeed lists of weird phenomena where #4 will shock you. There really is a huge, Texas-sized floating trash pile in the Pacific Ocean, and though you can’t walk on it at the moment, it’s only barely science fiction to imagine that one day, you will.
From the moment I finished the story, I had the little seed planted in the trash heap of my backbrain that there was more Tetley to tell. I had fallen in love with her, and I didn’t want to let her go so quickly. Like any human life, hers does not end where the page ends. There is always more. A life in episodes.
The Past Is Red is … more.
And this book contains both.
Tetley is older, more hurt, more bitter, but still herself, still loyal and in love with her home, still loyal to her trashcan god Oscar, still hopeful. But The Future Is Blue and The Past Is Red were written on opposite sides of the 2016 elections, and it is a different world now, at the very end of 2020. A world we have adapted to quickly, since it is so rotten and depressing, a world that has become the new normal. Our Garbagetown. It is hard to be quite as sunny about the behavior of we merry Fuckwits as one was in January 2016. Hard to sing quite as cheerful a tune about what the powers that be will allow us when the sea starts to truly hit the fan.
But Tetley is beyond all the fear and uncertainty of the present. She lives in her world, the only world she has ever known, and it shines for her, as the ’50s shine for one generation and the ’80s for another, despite the dystopia of both periods. She is, in some sense, my best hope for us, for our future, that we will live, and remember a little, and some of us will even be happy, after everything goes to hell. She is the part of humanity that will love anything, find meaning in anything, build a new civilization out of anything, because it’s a compulsion with us. I don’t have a lot of hope for the powers that be pulling us out of the tailspin they put us into. But I have hope for Tetley. For the other worlds to come, which will not be this one, which may never have the ease of this one again, but which will be, one way or another. And be loved by someone.
The Past Is Red Page 12
