Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  The two stared at each other through the blowing dust.

  “He’s pretty good,” Maya shouted again. “You can keep him.”

  Blight took a step toward her. Maya grinned fearlessly. “Love you, Mom! Don’t worry, I won’t get into any trouble.”

  She jammed down on the pedals and powered off toward open playa.

  “You appear to have given birth to the Tasmanian Devil,” I said.

  “Shut up, amateur,” she said. “This is what they’re supposed to be like at fifteen. I’d be worried otherwise.”

  BY THE TIME THEY sent Pug home to die, Blight was practically living with me—after getting laid off and going freelance, there was no reason not to. I gave her the whole garage to use as workspace—parked my car in the driveway and ran an extension cord out to it to charge it overnight—but half the time she worked at Minus. Its latest incarnation was amazing, a former L.A. Department of Water and Power substation that was in bankruptcy limbo. After privatization and failure, the trustees had inventoried its assets and found that it was sitting on all these mothballed substations and offered them out on cheap short-term leases. Minus was practically a cathedral in those days, with thirty-foot ceilings, catwalks, even two behemoth dynamos that had been saved from the scrappers out of pure nostalgia. They gave the place a theatrical, steampunk air—until someone decided to paint them safety orange with hot-pink highlights, which looked pretty damned cool and pop art, but spoiled the theater of the thing somewhat.

  Pug was no idiot—not like me. So when he found a lump and asked the doctor to look into it and spent a week fretting about it, he’d told me and Blight and a bunch of his other friends and did a week of staying on people’s couches and tinkering with the Gadget and going to yoga class and cooking elaborate meals with weird themes—like the all-coconut dinner that included coconut chicken over coconut rice with coconut flan for dessert. And he arranged for me to drive him to the doctor’s office for his follow-up visit.

  We joked nervously all the way to the waiting room, then fell silent. We declined to be paged by the receptionist and sat down instead, looking from the big, weird, soothing animation on the fifty-inch TV to the health pamphlets that invited us to breathe on them or lick them for instant analysis and follow-up recommendations. Some of them seemed to have been licked already.

  “Scott Zrubek?” said the receptionist from the door, looking from her screen to Pug’s face.

  “That’s my slave name,” he said to me as he got up and crossed to her. “Forget you ever heard it.”

  Twenty minutes later, he was back with a big white smile that went all the way to the corners of his eyes. I stood up and made a question of my raised eyebrows. He high-fived me and we went out to the car. The nurse who’d brought him back watched us go from the window, a worried look on her face, and that should have tipped me off.

  “All okay, then,” I said. “So now where?”

  “Let’s get some lunch,” he said. “There’s a chicken shack up on the left; they serve the best chili fries.”

  It was one of those drive-in places where the servers clipped trays to the windows and served your food on them, a retro-revival thing that made me glad I had vinyl seats.

  “What a relief,” I said, slurping on my shake. They had tiger-tail ice cream—a mix of orange and black licorice flavor—and Pug had convinced me to try it in a shake. He’d been right—it was amazing.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “About that.”

  “About what?”

  “Doc says it’s in my liver and pancreas. I can do chemo and radiotherapy, but that’ll just tack a couple months on, and they won’t be good months. Doc says it’s the kind of cancer where, when a doctor gets it, they refuse treatment.”

  I pulled the car over to the side of the road. I couldn’t bring myself to turn my head.

  “Pug,” I said. “I’m so sorry—”

  He put his hand on mine and I shut up. I could hear his breathing, a little fast, a little shallow. My friend was keeping it together so much better than I was, but he was the one with the death sentence.

  “Remember what you told me about the curve?” he said. “Back when you thought you had cancer? The older you get, the more friends will die. It’s just statistics. No reason I shouldn’t be the next statistic.”

  “But you’re only thirty—”

  “Thirty-three,” he said. “A little lower on the curve, but not unheard of.” He breathed awhile longer. “Not a bad run.”

  “Pug,” I said, but he squeezed my hand.

  “If the next sentence to come out of your mouth includes the words ‘spontaneous remission,’ I’m going upside your head with a roll of quarters. That’s the province of the Smurfs’ Family Christmas, not the real world. And don’t talk to me about having a positive attitude. The reason all those who’ve died of cancer croaked is because they had cancer, not because they were too gloomy.”

  “How about Laura?” I said. They’d been dating on and off for a couple months. She seemed nice. Did some kind of investment analysis for an ethical fund.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Don’t suppose that was going to be serious. Huh. What do you think—tell her I’m dying, then break up; break up and then tell her I’m dying; or just break up?”

  “What about telling her you’re”—I swallowed—“dying, then giving her the choice?”

  “What choice? Getting married? Dude, it’s not like I’ve got a life-insurance policy. She’s a nice person. Doesn’t need to be widowed at thirty-two.” He took his hand back. “Could you drive?”

  When we got onto the 10, he chuckled. “Got some good birthdays in at least. Twenty-seven, that’s a cube. Twenty-nine, prime. Thirty-one, prime. Thirty-two, a power of two. Thirty-three, a palindrome. It’s pretty much all downhill from here.”

  “Thirty-six is a square,” I said.

  “Square,” he said. “Come on, a square? Don’t kid yourself, the good ones are all in that twenty-seven to thirty-three range. I got a square at twenty-five. How many squares does a man need?”

  “Damn, you’re weird,” I said.

  “Too weird to live, too beautiful to die.” He thumped his chest. “Well, apparently not.” He sighed. “Shit. Well, that happened.”

  “Look, if there’s anything you need, let me know,” I said. “I’m here for you.”

  “You’re a prince. But you know what, this isn’t the worst way to go, to tell the truth. I get a couple months to say good-bye, put things in order, but I don’t have to lie around groaning and turning into a walking skeleton for six months while my body eats itself. It’s the best of both worlds.”

  My mouth was suddenly too dry to talk. I dry-swallowed a few times, squeezed my eyes shut hard, put the car in gear, and swung into traffic. We didn’t speak the rest of the way to Pug’s. When we pulled up out front, I blurted, “You can come and stay with me, if you want. I mean, being alone—”

  “Thanks,” he said. He’d gone a little gray. “Not today, all right?”

  Blight wasn’t home when I got back, but Maya was. I’d forgotten she was coming to stay. She’d graduated the year before and had decided to do a year on the road with her Net-friends, which was all the rage with her generation, the second consecutive cadre of no-job/no-hope kids to graduate from America’s flagging high schools. They’d borrowed a bunch of tricks from their predecessors, most notably a total refusal to incur any student debt and a taste for free online courses in every subject from astronomy to science fiction literature—and especially things like agriculture and cookery, which was a critical part of their forager lifestyle.

  Maya had cycled to my place from the Greyhound depot, using some kind of social bike-share that I hadn’t ever heard of. On the way, she’d stopped and harvested berries, tubers, herbs, and some soft-but-serviceable citrus fruit. “The world’ll feed you, if you let it,” she said, carefully spitting grapefruit seeds into her hand. She’d scatter them later, on the next leg of the bike journey. “Especially
in L.A. All that subsidized pork-barrel water from the Colorado River’s good for something.”

  “Sounds like you’re having a hell of a time,” I said.

  “Better than you,” she said. “You look like chiseled shit.” She grabbed my shoulders and peered into my eyes, searched my face. It struck me how much like her mom she looked, despite the careful checkerboard of colored zinc paste that covered her features in dazzle-patterns that fooled facial-recognition algorithms and fended off the brutal, glaring sun.

  “Thanks,” I said, squirming away, digging a glass bottle of cold-brewed coffee out of the fridge.

  “Seriously,” she said, pacing me around the little kitchen. “What’s going on? Everything okay with Mom?”

  “Your mother’s fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “So why do you look like you just found out you’re going to have to bury euthanized dogs for community service?”

  “Is that real?”

  “The dogs? Yeah. You get it a lot in the Midwest. Lot of feral dogs around Ohio and Indiana. They round ’em up, gas ’em, and stack ’em. It’s pretty much the number one vagrancy penalty. Makes an impression.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Stop changing the subject. What’s going on, Greg?”

  I poured myself some coffee, added ice, and then dribbled in a couple of teaspoons’ worth of half-and-half, watching the gorgeous fluid dynamics of the heavy cream roiling in the dark brown liquid.

  “Come on, Greg,” she said, taking the glass from me and draining half of it in one go. Her eyes widened a little. “That’s good.”

  “It’s not my story to tell,” I said.

  “Whose story is it?”

  I turned back to the fridge to get out the cold-brew bottle again. “Dude, this is weak. Come on, shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased. Don’t be such a guy. Talk.”

  “You remember Pug?”

  She rolled her eyes with teenage eloquence. “Yes, I remember Pug.”

  I heaved in a breath, heaved it out again. Tried to find the words. Didn’t need to, as it turned out.

  She blinked a couple times. “How long has he got?”

  “Couple months,” I said. “Longer, if he takes treatment. But not much longer. And he’s not going to take it anyway.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s a bad trade anyway.” She sat down in one of my vintage vinyl starburst-upholstered kitchen chairs—a trophy of diligent L.A. yard-saling, with a matching chrome-rimmed table. She looked down into her coffee, which had gone a thick, uniform pale brown color. “I’m sorry to hear it, though.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Me too.” I sat with her.

  “What’s he going to do now?”

  I shrugged. “I guess he’s got to figure that out.”

  “He should do something big,” she said, under her breath, still staring into the drink. “Something huge. Think about it—it doesn’t matter if he fucks it up. Doesn’t matter if he goes broke or whatever. It’s his last chance, you know?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I think it’s really up to him, though. They’re his last months.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “They’re our last months with him. He’s going to turn into ashes and vanish. We’re going to be left on this ball of dirt for however many years we’ve got left. He’s got a duty to try and make something of it with whatever time he’s got left. Something for us to carry on. Come on, Greg, think about it. What do you do here, anyway? Try to live as lightly as possible, right? Just keep your head down, try not to outspend that little precious lump of dead money you lucked into so that you can truck on into the grave. You and Mom and Pug, you all ‘know’ that humans aren’t really needed on Earth anymore, that robots can do all the work and that artificial life forms called corporations can harvest all the profit, so you’re just hiding under the floorboards and hoping that it doesn’t all cave in before you croak.”

  “Maya—”

  “And don’t you dare give me any bullshit about generational politics and demographics and youthful rage and all that crap. Things are true or they aren’t, no matter how old the person saying them happens to be.” She drained her drink. “And you know it.”

  I set down my glass and held my hands over my head. “I surrender. You’re right. I got nothing better to do, and certainly Pug doesn’t. So, tell me, wise one, what should we be doing?”

  Her veneer of outraged confidence cracked a tiny bit. “Fucked if I know. Solve world hunger. Invent a perpetual motion machine. Colonize the moon.”

  WE WROTE THEM ON the whiteboard wall at Pug’s place. He’d painted the wall with dry-erase paint when he first moved into the little house in Culver City, putting it where the TV would have gone a few decades before, and since then it had been covered with so much dry-erase ink and wiped clean so many times that there were bald patches where the underlying paint was showing through, stained by the markers that had strayed too close to no-man’s-land. We avoided those patches and wrote:

  SOLVE WORLD HUNGER

  PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE

  MOON COLONY

  The first one to go was the perpetual motion machine.

  “It’s just stupid,” Pug said. “I’m an engineer, not a metaphysician. If I’m going to do something with the rest of my life, it has to be at least possible, even if it’s implausible.”

  “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be—”

  “How have you chosen your projects before?” Maya said. She and Blight sat in beanbag chairs on opposite sides of the room, pointedly watching the wall and not each other.

  “They chose me,” Pug said. She made a wet, rude noise. “Seriously. It never came up. Any time I was really working my nuts off on something, sweating over it, that was the exact moment that some other project demanded that I drop everything, right now, and take care of it. I figure it was the self-destructive part of my brain desperately trying to keep me from finishing anything, hoping to land a Hail Mary distraction pass.”

  “More like your own self-doubt,” Maya said. “Trying to keep you from screwing something up by ensuring that you never finished it.”

  He stuck his tongue out at her. “Give me strength to withstand the wisdom of teenagers,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter how old the speaker is, it’s the words that matter.” She made a gurulike namaste with her hands and then brought them up to her forehead like a yoga instructor reaching for her third eye. Then she stuck her tongue out, too.

  “All right, shut up, Yoda. The point is that I eventually figured out how to make that all work for me. I just wrote down the ideas as they came up and stuck them in the ‘do-after’ file, which means that I always had a huge, huge do-after file waiting for me the second I finished whatever I was on at the time.”

  “So fine, what’s the next on your do-after file.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing worth my time. Not if it’s going to be the last splash. Nothing that’s a legacy.”

  Blight said, “You’re just overthinking it, dude. Whatever it is, whip it out. There’s no reason to be embarrassed. It’d be much worse to do nothing because nothing was worthy of your final act than to do something that wasn’t as enormous as it could have been.”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Pug said. “Seriously.”

  “Okay, back to our list.” She closed her eyes and gave a theatrical shudder. “Look, it’s clear that the methods you use to choose a project when you have all the time in the world are going to be different from the method you use when there’s almost no time left. So let’s get back to this.” She drew a line through PERPETUAL MOTION. “I buy your reasons for this one. That leaves MOON COLONY and WORLD HUNGER.” She poised her pen over MOON COLONY. “I think we can strike this one. You’re not going to get to the moon in a couple of months. And besides, world hunger—”

  “Fuck world hunger,” Pug said, with feeling.

  “Very nice,” she said. “
Come on, Pug, no one needs to be reminded of what a totally with-it, cynical dude you are. We’ve all known all along what it had to be. World hunger—”

  “Fuck. World. Hunger,” Pug repeated.

  Blight gave him a narrow-eyed stare. I recognized the signs of an impending eruption.

  “Pug,” I said, “perhaps you could unpack that statement a little?”

  “Come on,” he said. “Unpack it? Why? You know what it means. Fuck world hunger because the problem with world hunger isn’t too many people, or the wrong kind of agriculture, or, for fuck’s sake, the idea that we’re not doing enough to feed the poor. The problem with world hunger is that rich, powerful governments are more than happy to send guns and money to dictators and despots who’ll use food to control their populations and line their pockets. There is no ‘world hunger’ problem. There’s a corruption problem. There’s a greed problem. There’s a gullibility problem. Every racist fuck who’s ever repeated half-baked neo-Malthusian horseshit about overpopulation, meaning, of course, that the ‘wrong’ kind of people are having babies, i.e., poor people who have nothing to lose and don’t have to worry about diluting their fortunes and squandering their pensions on too many kids—”

  “So there’s a corruption problem,” I said. “Point taken. How about if we make a solution for the corruption problem, then? Maybe we could build some kind of visualizer that shows you if your Congresscritter is taking campaign contributions from companies and then voting for laws that benefit them?”

  “What, you mean like every single one of them?” Maya pushed off the wall she’d been leaning against and took a couple steps toward me. “Get serious, Greg. The average elected official spends at least half of their time in office fund-raising for their next election campaign. They’ve been trying to fix campaign financing for decades and somehow, the people who depend on corrupt campaign contributions don’t want to pass a law limiting corrupt campaign contributions. Knowing that your senator is on the take only helps if the guy running against him isn’t also on the take.

  “Come on, dude,” she said. “The guy is dying, you want him to spend his last days making infographics? Why not listicles, too?” She framed a headline with her hands. “Revealed: the ten most corrupt senators! Except that you don’t need a data analysis to find the ten most corrupt—they’ll just be the ten longest-serving politicians.”