Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  It didn’t take Mona more than a second.

  I don’t know why for sure, but I didn’t wanna give her the paper. In the end I had to, on account of how I didn’t know how to say that bit in gobbledygook.

  I gave her the paper and said, ‘What’s this mean?’ and she stared at it for a while, frowning, but only for like thirty seconds, and then she laughed and said, ‘Hey! Voltaire!’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said.

  ‘1694 to 1778,’ she said, and I said, ‘Yuh, obviously’ so she stuck her tongue out at me and then I said, ‘What’s that funny writing?’

  ‘It’s French. Well, it’s not. It’s someone writing something down how it sounds. Just like Polleux’s name, see? Ash, where’d you get this?’

  So then I had to tell her. I didn’t tell her how I found it. I just said it was in some of Bly’s stuff. And she sighed and took it okay.

  She said, ‘This line. Eelfoh cooltivay notra jar dun. That’s Voltaire. Only it should be like this.’ And she grabbed a pen and wrote it out for me.

  Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

  And I asked, ‘What’s it mean?’

  ‘Well, it don’t go straight into English. It would mean something like “we gotta tend our garden.”’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Uh-huh. Yeah, I got it. Uh-huh.’ And other stupid stuff like that.

  Then I added, ‘Uh-huh, so. And that other bit?’

  ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Well, the bit about the garden, and that bit? They both come from Voltaire’s best-known story.’

  ‘He wrote books too? Storybooks?’

  ‘Lots of philosophers did. I think it’s on account of thinking too much.’

  ‘How’s that now?’

  ‘Well, the difference between a writer and a philosopher? I reckon they both ask questions, but only the philosopher tries to give the answers too.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘So when a philosopher is thinking, and thinking, and they wanna say something but they don’t exactly got an answer, well, then they write a story instead.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Uh-huh. So what’s this book of his?’

  ‘It’s called Candide. It’s about a young man who goes out into the world and has all sorts of crazy adventures. And mostly it’s full of all these terrible things happening. I mean real terrible. There’s the Lisbon earthquake. That was a real thing. Some hundreds of years ago. Destroyed the whole city, there was a tsunami, tens of thousands dead. It was like the end of the world. Well, it was for the people in Lisbon, right? But it had a big effect around the world too, when people heard about it. Like it was Judgment Day or something. Voltaire put it in his book, because don’t ask me why but people always like stories about the end of the world, right? And then he made up a whole bunch of other awful things too. People being flayed alive, people being executed, people getting raped and getting incurable diseases and all.’

  ‘Sounds a real giggle.’

  ‘Yeah, well, in point of fact it is. It’s a real funny book. See, the whole thing is a joke aimed at this other philosopher. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. 1646 to 1716. See, what Leibniz said was that we oughta be optimistic. No matter what. He argued that since this is the world that God has created, well heck, that must mean it’s the best possible one. Because God’s top dog, right? So anything He does must be the best. And if it’s the best possible world, then anything that happens in it must be the best possible thing that can happen. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I mean, wrong. I mean, it sounds logical and all but who the heck would actually think that for real?’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Anyway, so all these bad things keep happening to Candide but mostly to his friends, and to a woman called Cunégonde who he falls in love with, but there’s this real wiseass in the book, name of Professor Pangloss. And what Pangloss keeps telling Candide is—’

  ‘—that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?’

  ‘Bingo.’

  I thought about that for a while.

  ‘Kinda funny, isn’t it?’ Mona said after a bit, ‘kinda?’ and I nodded but it didn’t sound that funny to me.

  ‘This book, well, no one reads it anymore, but it’s still important. Like, for one thing, the humor in it? The whole joke aimed at Leibniz? It’s called philosophical irony, but you can just think of it as being way sarcastic. Well, years later, it led to a whole raft of books, like science-fiction books, the ones that show a future that everyone thinks is real fine, but in fact is terrible.’

  I’d read some of those kinds of books. Books about the end of the goddamn world. Like Mona said, people sure must like stories about the end of the world; there were hundreds of ’em. I kinda liked them, but they sure got depressing when you read a stack of ’em back to back.

  ‘Speaking of,’ said Mona, ‘you hear about that city they wanna build west of Phoenix? You know that guy, that computer guy, the zillionaire? What’s his dang name? Anyway, he wants to build a brand-new hi-tech 25,000-acre city out there in the desert, just west of Phoenix. And this is a place where fifteen days last year it was so hot planes could not take off because of the lack of lift. That’s real smart, huh! Trying to ignore the laws of physics. Real smart.’

  And she burst out laughing, like she always did. Specially when something was dumb.

  But I was thinking about something else.

  ‘Mona?’ I said, and she said, ‘What is it, Snowflake?’ and I said, ‘That French thing? What does it mean?’

  ‘I said, it means—’

  ‘No, I mean, what’s it really mean? We have to tend our gardens…?’

  ‘People debate that,’ Mona said. ‘For instance, some folks think it means we oughta just look after our own business and not meddle with others. And some folks say it means we oughta change the way the world is working.’

  So I said ‘huh’ and then I said, ‘Well why’s it on this piece of paper?’

  Then Mona gave me the Snowflake shrug and said she did not rightly know and I knew I was at the end of Mona’s answers.

  All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. That was what had been in Bly’s head. And by putting my name on the world’s most irritating suicide note, that meant he meant for me to see what had been in his head.

  That, and the thing about gardens, and the name of John Polleux. So that’s when I knew if I really wanted any answers, then that’s where I’d have to go. Out into the desert, out into the deep.

  W

  The Wizard of AZ

  And what a fine and eager kid I was, I was then. You know how I can still see all the way back to my brightness, my burning brightness, and I can feel it all, as yesterday, my chomping child, me, the eager little scout of the world’s adventures! And now there’s more than a little tiredness in my bones, but yet I wonder, oh, how did I manage to do what I did?

  Even tired as I was then, with years of sickness in my bones, something inside me was stronger, and I guess it was that strong thing that dragged me out into the desert.

  ’Course, I didn’t go right at once. No, not me. Me, I had to set around in my house that Jenny had given Steve that he’d sold me for a dollar. I can’t believe that when I think about it now, all these years later. A house for a dollar. And that was when money didn’t go very far at all. Now it don’t get you nowhere. But you all know that, right? We all know that after What Happened.

  No, being me, little old Snowflake, I set around for a day or two, or it might have been three months. Time had kinda lost its meaning for me then anyway, and looking back from here, it’s hard to tell whether something took a minute or a year. And trust me when I tell you, truth is, it don’t matter.

  What I did was this. I would turn my conversations with people around to John Polleux. I didn’t want anyone to know I was going, and again, I couldn’t have told you for why, not then. I can tell you now, easily enough. I didn’t tell anyone because this was something between me and Bly and no one
else. It was our private business, and though I didn’t know that right out, I just didn’t want anyone to know. Now I see it was because if he’d kept his dying from me, I needed to make his secret my secret. To bring us closer again. To stop me feeling betrayed by him. But I couldn’t have told you that then.

  So, say I might be talking to Finch, or Mary. Or whoever, ’cept I didn’t do it with Mona because I knew she’d guess. She was the smartest of the canaries, and she knew me best and she would have guessed. But with everyone else I would steer the talk around to Polleux and pretty soon I found out where he was at, and which road to take, and so on, and then, one day, I put myself in Bly’s truck and drove.

  I left early morning.

  Like I say, I do not know which morning it was, but it was sometime after Detlef’s party and sometime before the monsoon came around again. Each year, the monsoon had been getting wilder and wilder. The old-timers said that once you could set your watch by it. But these days, it would arrive late, either that or early, and go early, either that or leave late. And it would hammer the rain into the ground and we thought the world was ending.

  So it was the hottest part of the year and that was real smart of me. Still, I thought I was doing the right things. From out of a box someplace, I found my old cell phone, and the charger, and I charged it up. There was two things about that. First thing, it still worked, and that was weird, somehow. It had been years since I had picked it up. Four? Five maybe. It was still alive, even though I had paid it no attention in all that time, and like plastic bottles of pills, I guess things are more immortal than people. So I turned it on and of course it didn’t get a signal. Never had, but what I realized was I had no way of knowing whether the phone company had disconnected me or whatever. If my credit was still good, or whether they let it expire after two hundred years of not using it.

  Second thing was, I looked at the photos again. All my old photos. There was about a hundred of ’em on there, and of course they were just the same. The photos of Mary-Beth and Ximeno and Malik. They were all there and they were all the same. They hadn’t aged a day. And neither had the guys in the shoe store. The photos of Jack. One or two with Suzanne.

  That one single photo of Bly.

  And then there was my mom. Who once upon a time I had wanted back in my life. And at that precise time, I knew that was over. In the photos, everyone was just the same. Like before, everyone was from before I was sick. But there was one thing that was different, and that of course was me, because I looked at the photos, but it didn’t hurt no more. Not even looking at a photo of my mother, and then I knew I had become someone else. I looked at her and I thought, you are a poor woman and I hope you find what you’re after in the end. Because it sure ain’t me. But it didn’t hurt to think that anymore. It had just stopped hurting.

  So what was I doing with the phone? I don’t know. I figured maybe there’d be somewhere with a signal someplace up ahead. Well, I was wrong about that. And I figured maybe I’d want to take photos of something, and heck was I right about that.

  I took some food and wrapped it up, and I took a couple bottles of water, big ones. And I had filled the gas tank up the day before when I’d done a run to town for Dolly and Sally, so I was all set.

  Word was, you took the dirt turnpike past Detlef’s, and you kept on to the far end, till you met White Deer Trail. I drove slow past the Dead Elf’s place. Not too slow. But just right, thinking I didn’t want to stop for talk. Not today. But he weren’t home; the 1984 Mercedes was gone so Detlef was out being Detlef someplace.

  At White Deer, I knew I had to take a dogleg and then there’d be a trail without a name on it, but with a juniper bush at the corner. Now this was the part that had me worried. It was Detlef who’d told me that and I might have told you that juniper bushes was like rabbits out here: plentiful and multiplying. But when I saw the bush, I knew it was the one. It was by itself and bigger than most, and right on the corner of an unnamed trail, heading east and a little south.

  So off I went. I felt like Voltaire. A veronaut. A seeker after the truth. Then I told myself I was being stupid, and exactly what truth it was I was looking for, well, I might’ve been confused about that. Mostly I wanted to know why Bly had Polleux’s name on that piece of paper, along with those lines from Voltaire’s book. But I guess also, there was a tiny bit of me, that even after being sick for six years still thought it might be able to get well again. And that maybe Polleux would have the answers to that too.

  Now, six years into my sickness, I was doing just fine. I could drive about town. I could spend a few hours reading each day. As long as I wore my mask in town, and ate good, and stayed away from normies smothered in chemicals. I could even walk a half a mile on a good day, without feeling terrible. But any more than that and I was done for. It didn’t take much to push things over the edge, and then it would sneak up on me real quick, and everything would come back: the headaches, the rashes, the exhaustion. That was it, the simplicity of it, the damned tiredness. There’s still no way to say how that feels.

  So you might think it was dumb to go out into that heat, and you’d be right.

  It started out fine enough.

  Pretty soon, along the unnamed trail, I came to a fading painted sign that said private property: keep out so I ignored that and not long after I got to the site of Polleux’s house. His old house. They told me about this. This was the first place he’d built when he’d come to Snowflake. But he’d gotten worse when they’d built some power lines nearby, so that was that. He upped-sticks and headed out farther away from town, away from everyone. His old place was just setting there, empty, and unlike my phone and Bly’s bottles and the ten thousand wiggling bits of plastic in my backyard, it looked truly dead.

  I didn’t stop, but I slowed the truck to a crawl and wound the window down for a look that wasn’t covered in red dust. Two seconds of that and I put the window back up and cranked the AC a notch higher.

  I think it was Finch who told me it was another twenty miles in from here, but I don’t know if he’d ever been here. I don’t know if anyone had. Detlef had said how Polleux would come to town every month, maybe two, to stock up. How he spent the rest of his days in the deep.

  I rolled on, and the track was okay to start with but soon got rougher. I slowed down and notched up the AC some more and the desert emptied out around me. There was nothing. I swear, if I thought there was nothing at Mona’s, I was lying. That place was a metropolis by comparison. The land was a mite more rolling, and way in the distance there was some low hills. I crossed a dried-out riverbed, and though I guessed in a month or three it would be full of monsoon water, it sure looked like it hadn’t seen water since the dinosaurs crawled across what would one day and for a very brief time be called Arizona. It was only the first of many. I crossed dried streams in that old unnamed track, and even the junipers had given up trying. There was just that low scrubby grass here and there. A creosote bush. And nothing. And if any creature save me was stirring abroad that morning, they sure didn’t make it plain. At some point I guess I left Navajo County and headed into Apache County, but they don’t paint lines on the sand, so I had no idea when that happened. It just did.

  Now, what I hadn’t seen was something I oughta have seen. I was getting tired, real quick, and I kept cranking up the AC until I realized it was getting hotter and hotter in the truck anyway. Pretty soon it was obvious the darned thing had gone and broke, and I was just pumping hot air into the cab. I shut it off and thought maybe it was better to open the windows. So I did, and that was the wrong thing to do. I lost the last of any air in the cab that wasn’t over 90 and let in a whole bunch that was over 110, most likely.

  So I tried to speed things up. I measured I’d made ten miles, getting on for fifteen, when steam started to come out of the hood of the truck. So I sped things up a bit more, and I don’t know how much farther I got when there was a bang like someone had hit the engine with a hammer. A hammer that weighed a ton. Th
e truck stopped and from under the hood there was a roar of steam and smoke and the smoke looked angry.

  Then I saw a lick of flame and I grabbed one of the bottles of water and jumped out and about three seconds later the flames shot up through the vents on the hood like a dragon breathing fire.

  I looked at it, hands on hips.

  Then I said ‘yeah’ and then I thought a bit more and said ‘screwit’ which made me think of Finch and made me smile.

  But I was starting to realize what a fix I was in.

  I looked up the trail. Nothing. And I looked behind me though I knew there was nothing there too, because I’d just driven past it.

  I started to walk. Towards where I hoped in hell Polleux’s place was, because I guessed I was more than halfway, and it made no sense to turn back in that heat.

  Please be good was what I was saying to my legs. Please be a good day. Please be okay. You can keep going.

  That’s how I was thinking to myself. Then I tried not thinking anything, just putting step after step, and trying to look at the desert and see what Jenny saw in it, which I don’t know I’d ever managed to do. And yeah, there was plenty of times when she’d say to me ain’t the desert beautiful and I would agree, but I was white lying. The desert was not beautiful, it was terrifying in ways I could not number.

  Still, I walked and I tried to think like Jenny and I wondered what Polleux would be like and I tried not to think what might happen if this was the one day in a million he went to town.

  And I walked and I started to feel the sun burning my face. So I pulled up that faded red T-shirt and put it over my head until I could feel my back burning and then I pulled it down again. I drank some of the water, and some more, and I kept on going and I just thought if only there was one place of shade I could set for a bit, but there was nothing and the sun kept on and very soon my legs announced that they had had enough. Little pains started popping up here and there, and that was always a sure sign they was done. They was getting stiffer and harder to move, just like when you walk through the molasses at the beach, and I started to stagger forwards.