The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  This was my punishment: his reticence, the distance between us. I had called Darlene against his wishes. Now Tucker was watchful and aloof with me. The bag of disposable cell phones was gone; he threw them away to “remove all temptation.” More than once, he had repeated the story of Mike and the betrayal that ended their friendship. Dead to me, he said over and over, like a mantra. Then he would stare at me and sigh meaningfully.

  I accepted the change in our dynamic with the same bleak weariness that I accepted everything now. No part of me was fighting Tucker anymore. Cora had been crushed beneath fever and hopelessness, her voice silenced. The call to Darlene had been her final rebellion. Only Corey remained.

  There was nothing left for me but to follow Tucker like a duckling behind a fox, imprinted on the wrong species, aware on some level that this was not a safe guardian but lacking any other options. I never questioned his choices anymore, even privately, in my own mind. His will had become my own. His ideas flooded my head, and when he was away I did not think about anything at all.

  Every evening, Tucker came home bearing gifts of food and bottled water. The two of us would sit on the stoop of the mausoleum and share a veggie burger and a greasy sack of fries. We would stare at the ocean laid out before us, the setting sun freckling the water with thousands of shifting reflections. Behind us, the cityscape would change too, glittery and bustling. I had never seen a town so huge, so loud. There were always sirens wailing. The skyscrapers were painted on the clouds, ethereal and silky. The light from so many windows stained the night with an artificial glow. I could never see any stars.

  After a while, Tucker and I would move inside the tomb and close the door. We would lie down on the unclean, leaf-strewn marble, no bedrolls, no pillows. I would sleep uneasily. The corpses in the crypt were sealed behind a row of metal doors along the back wall, but their presence made itself felt. They often insinuated themselves into my dreams, climbing into the open air, tapping my shoulder with their rotting fingers and breathing on my neck with their hollow, papery lungs. There were seven dead people. I had examined the row of iron portals many times. The oldest corpse had been interred nearly a century earlier, the most recent only a decade ago.

  I did not like sleeping in that place, but I was too sick to remain awake for long. My illness had not broken since our arrival in California. Every night, my feverish brain would drag me down into dreams whether I wanted to go or not. Every so often Tucker would place his hand on my forehead, his palm oddly cold, pleasantly so. Then he would wince and withdraw his arm.

  “You’re fine,” he would say. “You’ll be fine soon.”

  My illness added an interesting note to our situation. In the daytime, I would lounge on the stoop and stare at things, my attention drifting on the wind, changing direction with each gust. I gazed at seagulls and clouds. My watch had stopped a while ago, so I had no way to keep track of time. I would wait in a stupor for Tucker to return, staring down the path where he had vanished, glancing up hopefully at any figure in the distance, watching the shadows scud along, feeling the first pangs of hunger, unsure how many hours had passed since he left. I did not know the day, the week, or the month, and I did not care; these were arbitrary designations. I understood now that the forward march of time was an illusion—a human construct. Time was circular rather than linear, composed of the solar orbit and the swing of shadows, rhythms of light and darkness. Everything moved, but nothing changed. Dawn broke, Tucker went away, the city blared, the tide surged, my fever smoldered, clouds floated, evening fell, Tucker returned, always different, always the same.

  The mausoleum was a bizarre residence. Even during the day, it had its own peculiar brand of silence. The smell was something I could never quite identify—acidic and dank. What the place lacked in charm, however, it made up for in isolation. No one had set eyes on me or spoken to me in days. The only people there were dead. Tucker told me to watch out for the caretaker—the old man who tended the graveyard, apparently all on his own. I had seen him a few times in the distance, shuffling along behind his broom, his back stooped with age. Once he spent the whole morning roaring around on a riding mower, relegating me to the mildewy interior of the tomb for several unpleasant hours. (Usually I did not go in there alone. I would wait on the stoop until Tucker could join me, and we would brave the corpses together.) As the days passed, I served as faraway witness to a few funerals. One morning I watched a ceremony near the western wall, a little knot of people, the pallbearers striding down the path in lockstep. A preacher of unknown denomination delivered a sonorous prayer.

  Sometimes I saw other children. The cemetery was ringed by a barred iron gate that offered a glimpse of the street outside. In the mornings, I liked to observe the bustle of activity as people got ready for work. Grown-ups in crisp clothes strode along, staring at their cell phones and clutching to-go cups of coffee. The children were back in school. I could tell by their knapsacks, their shiny outfits, their resigned demeanor. I kept seeing the same blond girl, her cloud of curls not quite contained by the baseball cap she always wore. Every afternoon, a slender boy with skin like obsidian would lope past the gates on his way home and bang a stick on each bar.

  I dreamed sometimes that I walked among them, backpack on my shoulders, eager to begin the fourth grade. But these dreams always dissolved into chaos—I was dressed like Corey, nobody remembered me, the teacher could not find my name on the roll call, and when Darlene came to pick me up from school, she drove right past me as though she did not recognize me.

  In my feverish state, I sometimes wondered if I was already dead. It was an otherworldly experience to sit among the gravestones and watch ordinary people living their ordinary lives. Maybe Tucker knew something I didn’t; maybe he chose this eerie hilltop as my final resting place. Maybe he had carried my lifeless body to the mausoleum. Maybe my death was the reason he was acting so strange—why he’d taken a job, why he seemed so solemn now, why he kept leaving me alone. Maybe this was the afterlife: you perished without knowing it and became a ghost that only your brother could see. Maybe I was haunting him, bonded to him, unable to leave his side even now. Maybe I would spend the rest of eternity on this sunlit hill, keeping an eye on those distant animals, the living.

  39

  Tucker took me to the ocean. It was his day off, he said, as he put on shorts and a tank top instead of the green jumpsuit. He brought me a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, something I had never before tried. While I ate, he washed me tenderly with bottled water, scrubbing beneath my arms and shampooing my scalp right there in the cemetery grass. I kept my underwear on in case any strangers were watching—and out of respect for the dead. The day was warm and golden. Every day in California so far was warm and golden. Drying me off, Tucker again laid a hand on my forehead and looked away. He removed a bottle from his pocket and poured a few pills into his palm.

  “Take them all,” he said. “It’s no cure, but it’ll help.”

  I slept through most of the drive to the sea. There was an ache in my jaw and another in my temple. To add insult to injury, I had lost a tooth somewhere in Arizona—a molar—and the raw pulp that remained was now sore as well. I had lost many teeth in my young life, but I had never experienced this kind of pain afterward. My head felt like a piñata midway through a birthday party: bruised, beaten, nearly broken open. The car dipped down a hill, and my eyes slid closed. There was sunlight on my cheek, movement in my bones. For a moment, I thought I was back home, sitting in the passenger’s seat of Daddy’s old pickup truck with Darlene at the wheel. Maybe she was driving me to school—Cora, not Corey—the fourth grade, I was supposed to be starting the fourth grade. Maybe she was taking me to the emergency room.

  “We’re here,” Tucker said.

  I sat up, blinking. The sea was an abstract painting: a band of azure sky above a swatch of indigo water above a ribbon of wet brown sand above a smear of hazel beach. I had never been to the ocean before. It seemed like th
e kind of place you might encounter in dreams: too raw and wild to be real, yet somehow familiar at the same time, an ancient impression belonging to my species, imprinted in my genetic code, a knowledge deeper than memory. I heard a chaos of distant voices, seagulls crying, the boom of waves, the bark of a dog—no, I thought, a sea lion.

  My brother climbed onto the curb in his bare feet. I followed suit. Before I knew it, we were running toward the surf, whooping with glee. The ocean worked a kind of magic on me, and for a while I was filled with energy, able to chase Tucker right into the first, astonishing kiss of a wave. The water glistened and pooled around my feet, ice cold and clouded with sand. Tucker threw his head back and laughed. We kicked splashes at one another. We pelted in tandem toward the seagulls, who launched into flight with indignant cries.

  Eventually, though, my head began to throb once more. My limbs grew weak. I sat, and then I lay down, the beach as warm as Darlene’s embrace. The gradations between land and water and air were no longer distinct. The horizon was blurry, the brim of the shallows always in motion, the wind laden with spray. All the states of matter were shifting, stone into sky into sand into ocean into sunlight.

  Tucker settled behind me, and we arranged our bodies so I lay with my head in his lap. He stroked my hair, which had started to grow out, reaching a shaggy, in-between state that made me look even younger than my age. To a casual observer, my gender was indeterminate. I did not know myself whether I was supposed to be a boy or a girl now. I did not care. My exterior matched the nebulous quality of my mind—a blank slate, empty of identity.

  “Once upon a time, there was a place called the Wildlands,” Tucker said.

  This was not how his stories usually began. I gazed up at him, his face dark against the dazzling sky. He circled my temples with his fingers.

  “Imagine a world out of balance,” he said. “The sixth mass extinction on the planet. A war between human beings and animals. That’s the world Corey and Tucker were born into.”

  I did not reply. I was captivated by the hypnotic movement of his hands. He traced crosses on my brow, casting shadows along my cheek.

  “Corey and Tucker were heroes,” he said. “They didn’t just sit back and let it happen. They fought against their own species on behalf of the animals.”

  I nodded. I had heard this from him so many times that it had lost all meaning. It had the same hollow feel as the Lord’s Prayer.

  “But war has casualties,” he went on. “Tucker worried about them. It kept him up at night. He didn’t care so much about the ones who died. They were fine. It was over for them. He worried the most about the ones who didn’t . . . fit.”

  My brother was leaning over me, boring into me with eyes as black as tar. The bridge of his nose was sunburned.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  He did not break the flow of his storytelling, answering me as part of the tale. “Tucker knew that his actions had consequences. You can’t chase some domesticated horses out of a field and expect them to figure out how to be wild again. You can’t free a bunch of lab rats from a cosmetics factory and hope they just shake off years of being tortured and caged. A fire in the desert might scare the rattlesnakes so badly that they leave everything familiar, but then where do they go? Do you see what I mean? There are always going to be outliers.”

  “Outliers,” I repeated. I did not know the word then.

  Tucker swung an arm, indicating the ocean, the palm trees lining the road, and the flat, featureless sky beyond, unblemished by even a single cloud.

  “Those were the real casualties of the war,” he said. “The ones that didn’t belong anywhere. A horse on the other side of the fence for the first time. A chimpanzee on the run from a lab. A grizzly bear looking for food in a mountain town. A tiger with zoochosis after years in captivity. Animals that were outside the Classification of Wildness. Outside the ecosystem itself.”

  His voice grew husky, subsiding for a moment. As he shifted position, he jostled my skull in the cocoon of his legs. His shins bristled against my neck.

  “Corey and Tucker,” he said. “They were the ultimate outliers.”

  “They were?”

  He smiled sadly. “They would never be able to rejoin civilization. Tucker knew that. They’d been battling against their own kind for too long. It had opened their eyes, transformed their brains. They weren’t like other humans anymore.” He shook his head. “They didn’t fit anywhere. There was no place for them.”

  I swallowed hard. Usually my brother’s stories had a calming effect on me. Not this one.

  “So where do we go?” I asked. “Where did Corey and Tucker go?”

  “The Wildlands,” he said, and his voice was louder now, charged with emotion. I shifted position, gazing up at him curiously. His entire manner had changed, his spine erect, his gaze fixed on the middle distance.

  “Those were Mama’s words,” I said.

  “Yeah. I finally understand what she was trying to tell me. Remember what the dictionary said? ‘Land that is uncultivated or unfit for cultivation.’”

  The roar of the sea increased in my ears. The waves began to roll in with a little more urgency, breaking and casting up a fine mesh of spray.

  “The Wildlands were a special place,” Tucker said, resuming his story. “A home for strays and runaways. All the refugees of this war.”

  I can still remember every word he said that day. I can still hear the murmur of his voice in my ear, tangled up with the keening of the seagulls and the boom of the sea. I can still feel his fingertips on my skin, his touch as gentle as the breeze. I can still feel the revelation of my new status—a castaway from the human world, a creature lost and in need of sanctuary.

  “The old ecosystem was gone,” Tucker said. “Humans had destroyed it. The Wildlands were something new. ‘Unfit for cultivation.’ That means no people, no civilization. Wild and Tame and Domesticated and Feral—any living thing without a place on the food chain—all the outliers found their way there. All the lost and lonely animals went to the Wildlands.”

  His face was filled with hope. His fists were clenched on either side of my head, an involuntary gesture, gripping my skull like a vise.

  “Green fields, blue skies,” he said. “And Corey and Tucker lived right alongside them. The only humans. A brand-new Eden.” He thumped his palm against his chest, a triumphant gesture. “This is all true, you know. This really happened.”

  I yawned. I could not help it. The sunlight and my fever flowed through my bloodstream like a sedative. The medicine Tucker had given me back at the mausoleum was wearing off. I felt my brother’s hands sliding beneath my shoulder blades, lifting me up, hoisting me into a sitting position. My temples began to throb, the sun blazing on my nape.

  “And in the end . . .” Tucker said, and paused.

  The silence stretched on. I blinked at him sleepily.

  “What happened to Corey and Tucker?” I said. “Did they live happily ever after?”

  “No,” he said. “But the Wildlands were the next best thing.”

  40

  We often awoke at the same moment. Our bodies had fallen into rhythm after so long in close company. I opened my eyes in the darkness of the tomb and felt Tucker stirring beside me. We yawned in unison.

  “The corpses,” he said. His voice sounded different in the black: muffled and tinny. “Do you have nightmares about them too?”

  “All the time,” I said.

  “Last night I dreamed that one of them was trying to smother me. It turned out I was just lying with my own arm over my face. Awful. I don’t think we should stay here anymore.”

  “Really?” I said hopefully.

  He got to his feet, slow and cautious in the gloom. I could not see much of anything—a sooty gleam beneath the door, the faint outline of the bench. Tucker’s figure was a hole in the world. When he pushed the door open, we reacted simultaneously, ducking away from the flood of morn
ing light. The warble of birds and the murmur of the wind poured into the musty crypt. The palm trees were banded by the rising sun. The ocean was a creamy gray blur, the horizon obscured by tufts of mist.

  For breakfast, Tucker and I shared bites of a crushed, three-day-old veggie sandwich. We sat on the stoop, passing a water bottle back and forth. He laid a hand on my forehead and looked away. He gave me pills, which were dusty on my tongue.

  “Promise me something,” he said.

  “Hm?”

  “When you die, don’t do what those guys did.” He pointed back into the mausoleum. “Don’t embalm your body and lock it in a box.”

  I said nothing, watching him.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I want you to decompose and feed the trees. I want you to be consumed by scavengers and beetles until there’s nothing left of you at all. That’s what we’re supposed to do. But this tomb . . .” He shook his head. “Those dummies filled their flesh with chemicals so nothing would eat their carcasses and sealed themselves away from the whole cycle of life. Can you imagine anything worse? That’s where ghosts come from. That’s why they’ve been haunting us.”

  I took another bite of my sandwich. I had the feeling that I was moving in slow motion, while my brother seemed sped up, like a video on the wrong setting.

  “Am I dying?” I asked.

  Tucker did not seem to hear me. He was following his own thoughts. After a minute, he turned to me and said, “It’s Sunday.”

  A flicker of motion caught my eye. A caramel-colored moth flitted past us and landed on a nearby trunk, seamlessly camouflaged against the bark. The bushes around the mausoleum rustled in a placid breeze.

  “Are you still with me?” Tucker said. “I need to know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He tapped my forehead with his fingertip. It was a sharp blow, and it sent painful ricochets throughout the network of my sinuses.