Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  There was a knock at the door. Isabel looked through the peephole. It was Mr. and Mrs. Comegys.

  “Come in.”

  They were a few years younger than her parents. Mr. Comegys’ hair was getting thin on top, but not going completely bald. He’d once been a heavy, burly man, but he’d lost a lot of weight lately. He had that warm, friendly look that more than substituted for conventional handsomeness. Mrs. Comegys was a thin little woman with a face that always looked worried and hair that was probably dyed black. They had a cooler with them.

  “We were getting a little worried,” said Mrs. Comegys. “We missed you at church the last couple weeks.” Isabel didn’t go to church out of any fervent belief. She went because her family had always gone, and because that, and a board game club that met on Thursday evenings, and helping with the lighting at a community theater, were the whole of her social life.

  “Sorry. I’ve been really busy with work.” Also, I’m not sure I should be interacting with people until the swee wears off. “And I’ve got a trip to get ready for.”

  “You’re really going to Texas for Christmas?” said Mr. Comegys.

  “Yeah.” They looked impressed. Interstate travel was either a lot harder or a lot more expensive than it used to be, depending on how you went.

  “Well, I hope they’re doing all right,” he said. “It’s a damn shame what happened to them.”

  “Have you heard from Mr. Roberts?” said Mrs. Comegys.

  “Yeah. The state is still trying to drag this out in court.”

  “Damn shame,” said Mr. Comegys again. “Well, I’ve got something you can serve for Christmas dinner.” He opened the cooler, took a good-sized chunk of red meat wrapped in tinfoil and handed it to her.

  “It’s nutria,” he said. “Hindquarters and saddle. I got rid of the glands without breaking ’em, so it should be good.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Isabel, “but I can’t possibly carry this all the way to Texas. Not on top of all this.” She waved a hand at the assembled bags of canned vegetables she was planning to bring.

  Mr. Comegys shrugged.

  “Eat it yourself,” he said. “Bring ’em some extra cans.”

  Isabel nodded. That made a lot more sense.

  And in all honesty, she was glad to have it. Muskrat was rich and delicious—like the dark meat on a turkey, but much more intense. Nutria wasn’t as good as muskrat, and was terrible if you ruptured the scent glands while dressing it out, but it was in season all the time—the sooner the invasive species was hunted to extinction in the Chesapeake, the happier everyone would be.

  Being handed a chunk of game woke up something weird and primitive in the bottom of Isabel’s mind: This man is a good provider. Attach yourself to him. He will bring you more meat. To which the rest of her mind responded he’s already married, stupid. His wife is standing right there. This is not the Neolithic. Shut the fuck up.

  “We’ve got some beans and stuff in the cupboard we can give you,” said Mrs. Comegys.

  “Don’t do that. Seriously. See, I’m limited to what I can carry in one load.” Isabel opened her freezer, moved some stuff around to make room and inserted the nutria meat with a feeling of gratitude. You couldn’t say people around here didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  * * *

  Late that night, Isabel was finding it hard to concentrate on her work. She could already feel the swee starting to wear off. It wasn’t a sudden crash, like what she’d heard coming off a drug high was like. It was more like a part of her had fallen asleep, like her arm if she slept on her side all night, and now the feeling in it was slowly starting to return. She readied her mental defenses. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have done nothing to feel guilty about. I wouldn’t have done it for my own sake, but I’ve got my family to think about. I did the right thing.

  If getting in touch with Sandy was right, why’d it take you so long?

  Excuse me? Weren’t you telling me not to do it? And aren’t you still telling me that?

  Like I said, I don’t do consistency. You weren’t trying to do the right thing. You were trying to avoid shame.

  If that was a mistake, then I stopped making it already. That’s your cue to shut the fuck up.

  Don’t I get to—

  No. No you don’t. I’m wise to you. You’re not my God, not my conscience, not my teacher, not my friend.

  If I do something that looks like it’ll turn out well, you tell me I broke the rules. If I obey the rules, you question my motivations. If I do something with good intentions, you tell me it’ll all end in tears. I’m done listening.

  All you have is words, and your words are lies.

  All you have is feelings, and a headache is a feeling.

  You have no power over me.

  You have no power over me.

  You have no power over me.

  The feeling of shame began to retreat, but a new feeling arose—embarrassment at doing this. As far as mental health went, it wasn’t a good sign when you were sitting alone in the dark repeating something to yourself over and over again.

  It’s okay. Mental health is like physical health—nobody’s ever at 100 percent. Everybody’s a little crazy. The important thing is to stay functional.

  I won’t take swee unless there’s no other choice, but I am never letting this thing stop me again.

  * * *

  It was just before noon, on a hot, dry winter’s day at the train station in Del Rio, Texas.

  Isabel’s journey here was the sort of thing best glossed over for narrative purposes. Given the choice, she would rather have glossed over it herself than gone through every single moment. The eastern and western halves of Amtrak’s network had once been joined together at Chicago and New Orleans. The tracks around Chicago were still being repaired or re-repaired, and New Orleans was an abandoned city. So in order to get here from Maryland in a reasonable amount of time, she had to take the train from Union Station to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, transfer to a bus to get to Houston, then transfer back onto the train and head further west. And she had to do all this while schlepping around two bags of groceries, a load of Christmas presents, and her own small personal luggage. And all while trying not to think about the hundreds of dollars all this was costing her—still cheaper than plane tickets—or how much she missed Hunter, who had also left Union Station by train.

  Anyway, she was within reasonable driving distance of Texas Foxtrot, and she had summoned a rental car to the train station. She put the presents in the back and got in, putting the canned goods on the passenger seat… or rather, the other passenger seat.

  It was Isabel’s first experience with a purely self-driven car. There was no steering wheel, no gearshift, no pedals. There was only a screen and a microphone. The microphone was for telling the car where you wanted to go. The screen was for watching videos or reading books, which Isabel couldn’t do in a moving vehicle because it always made her carsick. She felt like there at least ought to be a human set of controls in case something went wrong with the computer, like one of those early steamships that had masts and sails so if the engine broke down in the middle of the ocean, they wouldn’t all die.

  As soon as Isabel had fastened her seatbelt, a message appeared on the screen.

  “Drive me to FEMA Emergency Housing Center Texas Foxtrot.”

  This was going to be complicated. The camp wasn’t on the list of destinations and there was no street address, so Isabel found it in satellite photos on her armphone and patiently recited the GPS coordinates of the front gate.

  Just to be helpful, it began listing what she assumed were sponsored businesses and tourist destinations within a fifty-mile radius.

  “Fuck you,” she said. I’m trying to get to my family for Christmas, and you want me to go to Walgreen’s instead? How is that supposed to help?

  And like that, the list of suggestions was gone.

  You hurt its feelings.

  It doesn’t have feelings, you fucking li
ar. It was programmed to recognize words and phrases that signify irritation before somebody loses their shit and breaks the dashboard.

  Isabel looked at the manual. It told her to check and make sure she had entered the correct location in a clear voice, and then to call the help number. She called the help number. It told her that all lines were currently busy. Surprise, surprise. It also said to check the manual and be sure the answer wasn’t in there.

  Think. It says the place is not accessible by road. That means it’s running on map data, not satellite data… “New destination.” She found the GPS coordinates of the spot on the road nearest the front gate. This time, the car started without a problem. Guided by muscle memory, her hands flailed around in the empty spaces where the gearshift and wheel would normally be, and her feet drummed against the floor. The car pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the street.

  But before Isabel had gone two blocks, a warning message appeared. A dust storm was coming out of the west. It would be on top of her before she made it to the camp.

  A map appeared on the screen. Somewhere with food, thought Isabel. God knows how long I’ll have to stay there. She directed it to the parking lot of a restaurant just outside town.

  This cutesy message was accompanied by a series of diagrams showing how to take the tarp out of the trunk and cover the car with it so that the front grill and exhaust pipe were both protected. It was supposed to be a two-person job, and the wind was picking up, so Isabel had to plan ahead a little—tying the tarp into place at the windward corner first and letting the wind blow it over the rest of the car before she tied it down. It wasn’t that different from getting the tarp over Pop’s old skipjack.

  By the time she was done, there was a roiling cloud of burnt-orange across the western horizon. There were other cars pulling off the highways, people looking for any place they could take shelter. Isabel decided to go inside while she still had a chance of ordering a meal.

  The restaurant was a Cabratería, one of a new restaurant chain in Texas that had the odd ambition to be the Chick-fil-A of goat meat. They offered a small but tasty selection of Mexican-style entrées, all of which included goat. Isabel had only heard of them because they’d run a series of targeted ads online and there had been a mix-up at the ad agency. An ad reading “You’ve Earned It! Take Advantage of Cabratería’s Senior Discounts” was shown at a Fear of the Onyx fan site, while another ad exhorted AARP members to “Feast on the Flesh of the Goat.” Isabel ordered a medium burrito and a cup of chyq.

  As she ate, Isabel considered the ingredients of the burrito—goat, salsa, tortilla wrap, cheese—where they came from, and how long they were likely to remain affordable. The goat meat was no mystery—goats could live just about anywhere. And it seemed to be all meat, which was worth noting. Go to almost any fast-food restaurant these days and they’d be bragging—bragging—that their burgers were “50% Real Beef.” For about ten dollars more, you could get “75% Real Beef.” Only high-end restaurants served burgers made of pure bovine muscle and fat.

  As for the salsa, you could grow tomatoes and onions almost anywhere. A little research on her phone told her garlic and chili peppers were pretty adaptable too. Isabel wasn’t sure about cilantro, which turned out to be another name for coriander, but it wasn’t like they needed a lot of it. You could probably grow it in greenhouses.

  The tortilla wrap had an odd sweetness to it. Probably they’d mixed in some potato and cassava flour to keep the price low. The cheese… was the government still subsidizing and stockpiling it? It didn’t seem like the sort of thing Pratt would do, but it wasn’t like he was king.

  Isabel kept one eye out the window. Now the storm was a wall of dust-colored cloud that stretched out beyond the highway and reached higher than she could see through the window. It wasn’t obvious when the storm engulfed the restaurant—the parking lot gradually grew hazy, and the sky turned orange. At the table next to her, an old man who’d been a small child in 1940 was telling his grandchildren, or possibly his great-grandchildren, about seeing the last of the big dust storms blow through, the sky going dark and everything getting covered with grime. Some people were still driving out there.

  The sky darkened to red. Isabel thought about what she’d read about the original Dust Bowl. It had been an agricultural screwup—during a decades-long wet spell, farmers had started planting wheat in places wheat was never meant to grow. Then a terrible drought hit and all that plowed land dried out and started blowing east. Eventually the drought ended, and the land in question had become pasture, which it should have been from the beginning.

  The sky darkened to brown. Only the dim outlines of nearby buildings were still visible.

  The sky, and everything else outside the window, darkened to black—but not like night. Isabel could see the lights over the parking lot peeking through the torrents of dust and sand, but they did nothing.

  If I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she thought, I’ll tell them about this.

  Then she thought if I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they’ll probably think this is normal.

  * * *

  Even after the storm, the drive the rest of the way to Texas Foxtrot was a lot slower. There was so much grit everywhere that in places, it was like driving on dirt roads.

  Isabel’s car finally approached the camp, which didn’t look any better on the ground than it had in the satellite photos. First there was a line of fence topped with barbed wire that ran perpendicular to the road and stopped a few feet from the ditch. Then there was a line of what looked like portable classrooms. Then came trailers and shabby-looking cabins in neat rows, with alternating wide and narrow gaps between them. The strange thing was that Isabel could definitely see fences in the distance, on three sides, but no fence at all on the side facing the road. It made the camp look both evil and half-assed, as if built by a totalitarian regime that couldn’t finish anything without getting bored and wandering off.

  The entrance was dominated by a crowded parking lot with a portable classroom beyond it. There were cars parked on the side of the road near the entrance. The rental car pulled over and came to a stop just before the entrance.

  “Do you see the driveway up ahead, to the right?”

  “Enter that driveway.” That’s where I wanted you to go in the first place, she thought, but there was no point saying it.

  “Look for a parking place.”

  Of course. She wasn’t the only person wanting to visit her family on Christmas.

  “Pull over to the side.” It did, but the engine kept running.

  “Not a problem,” said Isabel, grabbing her overnight bag and groceries. “Once I’m out, you’re going back to the car rental. Come back here tomorrow at eleven a.m.” She made sure to put extra clarity into her voice for the key words and phrases.

  Isabel took her bags out, closed the driver’s side door and took one step toward the back of the car—but that was all she had time for before the car pulled forward, went past her and turned to go out the same way it had come in. Apparently it thought she wanted it to go back right now.

  “No, wait!” she shouted, but it was too late. The car took to the road and disappeared into the distance with the presents still in the trunk. Isabel spent a moment cursing quietly, but at least nothing in there was perishable, and she had the groceries with her. Whatever else, her family would have something for Christmas dinner.

  An electronic signboard out front directed everyone to get in line at the entrance, so she did. About an hour later, Isabel’s arms were aching from carrying the groceries, and she was glad she hadn’t tried to carry them and the presents into the camp all at once. This place had looked so small on the map. Barely two miles square.

  But at least now she was at the head of the line. “No, this is not a concentration camp,” someone was saying in weary tones to a white-haired man. “I don’t care what the news told you. Seriously, look around. You see any guard towers? Or guards, for
that matter? Machine guns? Big mean dogs?”

  Isabel had to admit this was a fair point. There were no towers or guards, and the only dog in sight was a harmless-looking puppy that a little girl was clutching in her arms.

  “But the fences!” said the white-haired man.

  “Yeah, the fences kinda throw people when they first get here. If you look closely, though, you’ll notice they’re not all one fence. That’s because we didn’t set them up. Local landowners set them up on their side of the property lines. Which they had every right in the world to do.”

  “And do they surround this camp?”

  “Well… most of it. But everybody here is free to leave.”

  “Then why would they stay here?”

  “Where would they go? Nobody here has a car, and the nearest town’s nine miles down the road. Cops on the road see you walking, they’ll pick you up for hitchhiking even if you got your hands in your pockets. And if you do get to town, you’ll last about five minutes before you get arrested for loitering. Then they’ll dump you right back here. But none of that is our fault.” True, thought Isabel, but it does kind of stretch the definition of “free to leave.” God bless America, the only country ever to create a gulag archipelago by accident.

  “I can help the next person over here!” came a man’s voice. That’s my cue.

  There were two people at the open desk—a white guy with a narrow face and a fringe of dark hair on an otherwise bald head, and a tiny Hispanic woman in a white lab coat whose face was half hidden behind the tablet. Their nameplates read Lawrence Bardwell and Ashley Natividad.