Afterland

by Lauren Beukes

  “You mustn’t think about such things.” Cole hands her a paper towelette to dab her eyes, so she won’t keep scratching around in there. “It’ll come right.” She steers her toward the door. “You’ll see, the whole world is working on it, the best scientists and epidemiologists.” All the fucking tests they ran on Miles back at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Her too. “Only a matter of time.” She’s trying to be cheerful, but the woman’s maudlin self-pity is wearing her down.

  Victim-blaming much?

  “C’mon, let’s get you back to your table,” she says as she aims her in the direction of the table and her oblivious friends.

  “Good job,” she whispers to Mila as they head for the exit, not looking back. “And also: you can never do that again. We’re going to send her a check in the mail, repay every cent.”

  “Sure, Mom,” her daughter the thief says, eyeroll implicit. Like Cole has a checkbook. Like she even caught the woman’s name.

  Bad mother. She can’t help it.

  6.

  Billie: Peripheral

  Knuckles like knots of pale wood on the steering wheel. Sickly sun rising wan and white. On the road to San Francisco. Isn’t there a song about that? Billie hums a few notes, trying it on. Something, something, ghosts, something dreaming of the West Coast. Driving with the headlights on, because that’s safer, even during the day. High visibility. Her dad taught her that. But the road signs make no sense. It’s an American thing, maybe, like imperial versus metric. But she might be lost. Sometimes she blinks and the landscape changes, and she’s pretty fucking sure it’s not supposed to do that.

  She avoids touching the back of her head, the stickiness at the back of her neck, caught in her hair. Shadows in the periphery. Like someone in the car with her.

  Not her sister.

  Fuck that cow.

  That useless selfish cunt. Always. She’s always been like this. So goddamn patronizing.

  Maybe you should get a job-job, Billie. Said in the same placatory tone you’d use on a three-year-old who was mad they had to wear pants. Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.

  It’s called seed capital, bitch. One in a thousand businesses take off. The rest fail and fail again and you better be willing to get up off the floor, wipe the blood off your mouth, get back in the ring, and try again.

  There is blood in her mouth. She can taste it. Bitter iron. Can’t shake the idea of someone sitting next to her (dreaming ghosts), and hasn’t she seen this corpse of trees before?

  Copse. Not corpse.

  Concentrate. Remember to drive on the right.

  Seed capital. Heh.

  It’s not fair. She’s been waiting for this her whole life. It’s not her fault her sister was so unreasonable. It was a misunderstanding. It’s not like she was kidnapping him. She was going to send for her.

  Cole didn’t have to hit her.

  Try to kill her.

  Coward. Like always.

  Billie’s the fierce one. Willing to do whatever it takes. Always something cooking. Chef joke. Heh.

  That’s what she was doing for Mr. and Mrs. Amato, executive chef, catering exclusive dinners in exotic locations where the law was…squishier, shall we say. From Manila to Monrovia, Bodrum to Doha. Someone has to feed the rich and unscrupulous.

  Unlike her idiot big sister, she’s never been naïve about the deep, dark currents flowing just beneath the surface of polite society. Working in restaurants, you get caught up in the eddies sometimes, not just the coke dealing in the bathroom (often to staff, because the job requires late nights and sparkle), a little credit card skimming on the side, but also the big scary protection rackets. Like that afternoon at La Luxe in Cape Town when a fleet of Mercedes pulled into the beachfront parking lot, and men in sharp suits announced that from now on, their private security company would be handling all the restaurant’s needs.

  But wasn’t it all a racket anyway? Barely a pubic hair of difference between the legitimate pharmaceutical industry and the drug trade, international banking and embezzlement and crypto-funded terrorism, arms dealing and illegal arms dealing. Billie had a pretty good idea of exactly who she was going to be working for when she met Thierry Amato in a members’ club in Soho, with his sharkish grin and dubious pals.

  Didn’t take a genius to recognize how dodgy they were, knots of men talking in undertones in the paneled libraries, the bodyguards, the mystery packages, sometimes passing through her very kitchen. She didn’t mind the discretion pay. But it took canniness and guts to seize the chance to move upward.

  Thwarted. Because her own fucking sister tried to kill her.

  Fighting tears. The road blurs. She should press charges. Attempted murder. What’s the word? Sororicide.

  She has to fix this. What if Mrs. Amato decides to wash her hands of the entire affair? Like Lady Macbeth. Out, damn spot. Semen instead of blood.

  Billie’s golden chance. For all of them. You have to grab opportunity by the balls. Sometimes even literally. That was the beauty of it, right? Not asking Miles to do something he wasn’t doing naturally anyway.

  She never laid a hand on him. Wouldn’t. Jesus. Never. But he could, himself. Easy. Do it with his eyes closed. What’s the big deal?

  Natural emissions. Like sinking a tap into a maple tree. The window is now, before they discover a cure or a vaccine, which will mean decriminalizing reproduction, throwing the sperm banks and embryo storage units open. And then a few specimen jars of boy juice won’t be worth millions anymore.

  White gold. She thought Cole was all for women’s right to control their own bodies. Doesn’t that include the chance to get pregnant? Okay for some, those who still have living kids, but not everyone is as lucky as her sister. Selfish. Selfish goddamn cunt.

  Has the sky gotten darker? How long has she been driving? The road stutters. Trick of the light. She’s definitely passed these corpse trees previously. Skeleton trees. Ghost in the passenger seat. She’s fine. Everything is fine. She doesn’t touch the back of her head.

  There’s other work she can do for Mrs. Amato. More and less illegal, whatever she wants. But this was hers, dammit. Her idea. Her risk.

  But Billie wants everything that was promised to her, everything Cole has denied her—freedom, agency, and the catalyst which makes all that possible: money in the bank—

  7.

  Cole: The Day Devon Died

  TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO

  All packed, ready to go. Grief like an extra suitcase that shifts its weight capriciously between too light and all the mass in the world. Cole comes out of the bedroom with their baggage to find Miles sitting cross-legged on the carpet beside the silver government-issue body bag, which is unzipped halfway and gaping like a chrysalis. He’s holding his father’s hand, not looking at his face, reading aloud to him from a graphic novel propped in his lap.

  “And then Nimona says, ‘Why would I kid about disintegration?’” His finger drifts to the next panel, following the trajectory, force of habit, because his dad isn’t going to be looking at the pictures anytime soon. Or ever again.

  She put the Death Notification decal in the front window twenty-four hours ago. A big black and yellow sticker with reflective chevrons. Plague here. Come collect the body. No, longer than that. Thirty-two hours ago. Too long to leave them here with a dead body. Or here at all, ten thousand miles from home.

  She sinks down next to her guys on the floor, the living and the dead. Devon’s face is empty and foreign without the life of him. An uncanny-valley 3D printed doll of her husband. They’ve been living with the anticipation for so long, inviting it into the room with them, every conversation, making jokes about it even, that the reality of death, the profane and profound guest late to the dinner party, is a letdown. She thinks, Oh, is that it? Is that all? Dying is hard. Living is hard. Death? Overhyped. First there was a person, now there is no person. She recognizes that this is self-defense. She’s just tired. Tired and numb, the grief woven through with anger. Wor
st friendship bracelet ever.

  Cole reaches out to touch her husband’s not-him-anymore face. The pinched pain has been smoothed away from his eyes, his mouth. The bristles of his number one haircut are soft against her palm. She’d shave it for him every Monday morning. Routines to give them some semblance of normalcy, to mark the days, even while the cancer climbed into his bones and made him cry in pain. She won’t be cutting his hair again, or rinsing the clipper blade out, the swirl of fine dark hairs like iron filings in the sink.

  They prepared the body according to the illustrated instructions in the FEMA Mercy Pack, which also came with rations and a basic first-aid kit and a water purifier straw. She clipped on the white ID tag, wrote down his name, Social Security number, time and date and place of death, and his religious denomination, if applicable, for whatever cursory ceremony was to follow. The leaflet doesn’t cover what comes after, but they’ve seen the footage of the new incinerators, the refrigerated containers with body bags stacked high. It was shocking the first time. But what else are you going to do with a billion corpses? The number still sounds implausible. Dreamlike. Not including “other, related casualties.” That chilling term.

  She added layers of rituals to counteract the impersonal bureaucracy so they could say goodbye. They washed Devon’s face and hands and laid his puffy coat over him, Miles’s idea: “in case he gets cold.” They crafted origami replicas of things he might need for the afterlife and tucked them in around his body (her idea), and held a glowstick vigil telling their favorite, silliest, bestest stories about his life until Miles went very still and very quiet and she realized all this was busywork that wasn’t going to take away from the essential truth. Man down.

  Her son half-lifts the graphic novel toward her, like an offering. “Do you want a turn to read?”

  She squeezes him under her arm, her boy, alive and warm, even with the dark circles under his eyes and grief vultured on his shoulders. “How long have you been down here?”

  “Dunno,” he shrugs. “I didn’t want him to feel lonely.”

  “Did you read the whole book already?”

  “I skipped some parts. I wanted to get to the end before…”

  “Yeah,” she stands up. “Nothing worse than an unfinished story. Right, I reckon we should eat. One last meal before we split this joint. The FEMA people have to be coming soon.”

  She will not miss this anonymous cookie-cutter house in the techburbs, designed for contract workers on short stays.

  “Pancakes?” Miles says, hopeful.

  “I wish, tiger. California rations, same as yesterday.”

  “And the day before.”

  “And before that. You’d think they could mix it up a little.”

  You’d think they could let them go home. All the emails and phone calls to the South African consulate, from the Montclair library, where they’ve cobbled together working internet, a landline. We don’t belong here. The auto-response, when her messages actually get through: global crisis blah blah blah, many citizens stranded, working to assist everyone we can, unable to respond to all messages at this time. Please complete the form providing as much detail as possible about your present circumstances and we will get back to you as soon as we’re able. Rinse, repeat. The whole world is tied up right now. This business of dying is admin hell.

  She hasn’t been outside since Devon got bad. Hasn’t made it to the library in weeks, doesn’t know which of the neighbors are still around, if any. In the already isolated suburb, the community meetings petered out: those who were able to, fled; the people who stayed closed ranks, nested down to attend to their dying and their dead. As long as the government ration packs still arrived…

  She pours out two bowls of oats, powdered milk, protein bars on the side. Breakfast-lunch-supper of survivors. Miles’s voice from the living room, now doing an evil-villain accent, wry, sardonic, interrupting her thoughts. “They had to choose the room filled with the deadly magical substance!”

  And then, startled, “Mom!” Headlights swipe across the living-room window, catching the reflective chevron of the decal.

  “Stay here,” she says, thumping down the bowls.

  “Why?” Miles, always the questioner.

  “In case!” Devon had tried to reassure them that testosterone was the key ingredient in all the worst-case scenarios. As if women weren’t capable of evil fuckery in their own right. So sexist, Dev, she rebukes, running out into the street.

  Man can’t catch a break, not even when he’s dead, she ripostes on his behalf.

  The FEMA van has pulled up outside, motor running, headlights aimed in twin halos at the front door, so she has to shield her eyes as she steps out. Two women clamber out, awkward in their bulky hazmat suits. Plague-o-nauts, she thinks. She can’t see their faces against the glare of the headlights, only the blank glass of their helmets.

  The larger of the two yells, aggressive. “Stay where you are!”

  “It’s okay,” the other one calls. “She’s not armed.”

  “I’m not!” Cole raises her hands in confirmation.

  “Can’t be too careful, ma’am.” Tall-and-Wide apologizes, moving in, her heft blocking the light. You’d have to be strong, in their line of work, heaving corpses around. “Where’s the body? Are you next of kin?”

  “It’s my husband. He’s inside.” An aftershock of grief nearly slams her to the ground, because they’re here, help is here, and this seems like a license to fall apart and let someone else handle this. But Miles. Always Miles.

  “Control. One adult,” the shorter of the pair says into her radio.

  “Did he have any other complicating conditions we need to know about?”

  “Like what?” Cole almost laughs.

  “Cholera. HIV. Measles. Excessive bleeding or decomposition. Weighs more than 300 pounds, anything that will make him difficult to move.”

  “No.”

  “How many days dead?”

  “Almost two. You took your time.” It’s hard to keep the bitterness out of her voice. She can make out their faces through the glass, finally, a stumpy white lady with a tight bow mouth, while the taller is Latina, or Polynesian, maybe, her hair tucked away under the ruched plastic that fits around her face like a shower cap, and blue glitter on her eyelids. It’s this detail that unmoors Cole.

  “Standard.” Stumpy dismisses her. “Less than forty-eight.”

  “You got any basic human compassion in that van?”

  “Ran out three weeks ago,” Stumpy hits back.

  “We are sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Blue Glitter says. “And we have our own. You have to understand, we’re on the front lines here.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course. Sorry. It’s a lot to deal with.”

  “Share your sentiment, ma’am. Here are the papers. We’ll be taking him to Central Processing for mandatory tests. You can claim the body in three days, or we can do the cremation and notify you when his ashes are ready to collect.”

  “No. We’ve already…we’ve said our goodbyes. You don’t need to notify me. We’re leaving right away.”

  She’s already running through the checklist of what’s in her bag, packed and ready. Clothing, food, $11,284 in cash in three different currencies (USD, ZAR and GBP) wrapped up in fat rolls with hairbands, and please let that be enough, and the infinitely more valuable contraband: codeine, Myprodol, Nurofen, Ponstan—the traveing pharmacopeia she’d carried from South Africa, where they could be bought over the counter, along with all the other travel essentials (cold and flu meds, anti-nausea pills, anti-inflammatories, antihistamines) that happened to be in her toiletry bag when they got stranded here all those months ago.

  She had packed them innocently, remembering her first trip to the U.S. on a student air ticket, her period coming early and the cramps knifing her guts, only to be told by the irritated pharmacist behind the counter at CVS that the Ponstan she could buy as casually as aspirin back home wasn’t available, not even with a prescription
. The diminishing stash they came to worship, which Dev dipped into only when the pain was so bad his breath came in whimpering hitches. They were saving the bulk of it for Miles. For in case. For when.

  “Your prerogative.” The bigger woman shrugs. “Maybe put your contact details down anyway, your forwarding address, or other next of kin. People change their minds.”

  “All right.” It’s so easy to follow instructions. “Oh,” Cole remembers. “Do you think you could help me jump-start the car? I tried to call AAA, but they’re not picking up. I don’t know why we pay them.” A joke, but also true. All the things you took for granted, like reliable internet and roadside assistance and access to hospital care, are apparently on hold right now.

  “That’s really not in our mandate—” the stumpy, grumpy white woman starts.

  “I’m sure we can. No problem,” her colleague interrupts. She hauls herself into the driver’s seat of the van and swings it around to nuzzle at the hood of Cole’s car. It would be a fitting part of the misery of this endless day if nothing happened when they hooked up the leads, but the engine fires right away and settles to a purr.

  “Leave it running, ma’am,” says Blue Glitter. “Juice it up a bit.”

  “Thanks, I’m so grateful, I just want to get out of here.” Cole is gushing (thanks for starting my car and hey, removing my dead husband’s body), close to hysteria now that escape is finally at hand.

  The plague-o-naut is all business again. “If you can just sign here, and here.” But then she spots Miles’s face peeking through the window, round and scared, and she softens. “Your little girl?”

  “My son.”

  “You shouldn’t be traveling with him,” she says.