The Electric Kingdom

by David Arnold

  “You were tracking me?” she asked.

  “Not on purpose.”

  “How do you accidentally track someone?”

  “I’m good at seeing where other people have been. And you’re not very good at hiding it.”

  Nico’s face flushed, and she whistled for Harry again (who’d snuck his way back over to the little kid). “I appreciate the offer. But we’re going to continue alone.”

  Loretta took a step closer, and while part of Nico tensed, the other part of her felt a vibrancy emanating from the girl, as if they’d just stepped into a patch of warm sunshine. “Do you know what I think when I look at you, Nico?”

  “What.”

  “I think, Here’s someone like us.”

  “Like you?”

  Loretta smiled. “The world’s leftovers.”

  In the back of the group, the little kid drew circles in the snow with a stick, his face like a plant someone had forgotten to water. Loretta seemed nice, but something sickly hovered in the whites of her eyes; the accuracy of Monty’s ax-tossing made Nico nervous; and while she didn’t hate the idea of traveling with Lennon, her mission to Manchester had cultivated a necessary isolation, a loneliness she couldn’t help but lean into. Like her mother’s old nesting dolls, she was a shell containing many Nicos, retreating deeper and deeper inside, constantly finding newer, tinier, tucked-away Nicos.

  “No offense,” she said, pulling out her compass. “But I’d really rather travel alone. Best of luck getting to Boston, though. And the coast.” She tucked the compass away, looked at Lennon: “Please don’t accidentally track me anymore.”

  She said goodbye to the group, and turned east, a mix of relief and sadness at the discovery of this new, tiniest of Nicos. Ten steps in, however, when she realized Harry wasn’t beside her, she turned to find him in the middle of the group, the little kid having abandoned his snow-art in favor of hugging Harry around the neck.

  Nico whistled.

  This time Harry stayed where he was, didn’t even pretend to hear.

  All around, the trees of the forest seemed to sink into the ground, the earth turned to water, endless ocean miles in every direction, and where there once was a group of kids, Nico saw only an orca. Why not tie your line to my dorsal fin, let me pull you to your destination?

  She walked back to the group. “You said the river’s a day from here?”

  Lennon shrugged. “Two, tops.”

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  Reasons

  She’d read enough to know that love was supposedly infinite, that the more you gave, the more you received, but she could not imagine this was true. Far more logical to think of love as the contents of a jug of water: the more people around your table, the smaller the portions. Some glasses would end up fuller than others, that was just the way it went. Only so much love to go around.

  Harry’s glass overflowed.

  Convictions

  For much of the morning, they walked in silence.

  Harry kept to her side, mostly, though occasionally trotted beside the little kid.

  Monty and Loretta were always together, whispering, holding hands.

  Lennon seemed to be the group’s navigator, leading the way up front.

  There was a palpable energy among them, and she thought again of Lennon’s words yesterday: There were six in our group. And there are only four now. Something had happened, some shared loss that made Nico an inherent outsider. Whether from this or something else, so far, being part of a group was not at all what she’d imagined.

  That said, she hadn’t spent much time imagining it. Her mind had been elsewhere, either on navigation or rations or fire or water or Flies, and behind it all, a persistent nagging doubt played like a single note over and over again: What if this whole trip is for nothing? What if the lines in her father’s head had dissolved so completely that he could not tell the stories of his past from the realities of his present?

  A different fear, too great to dwell on, but which seemed to grow with each step: What if her father died before the eight days were up? What if her worries about his lucidity were, in fact, unfounded, and his story was true, and she, like Voyager, would arrive in Manchester to find the legendary Waters of Kairos—only to discover they could not be activated because Bellringer had died during the intervening journey?

  The prospect was a poetic injustice beyond her reckoning.

  As if sensing Nico’s anxiety, Harry nudged her knee. “Hey, bud,” she said, stopping, kneeling to pull a bit of jerky from her bag. She fed some to him, ate a piece herself, scratched behind his ears, and wondered where in the world she’d be without him. And whether from this small dose of gratitude, or the revelatory insight that often comes from looking into the eyes of an animal you love, Nico understood that the doubt she’d felt since entering these woods was a mere offshoot of her family’s evergreen conflict:

  The conviction of her mother, to find hope and truth in ancient stories.

  The conviction of her father, to find hope and truth in that which could be tested and observed.

  “Lost,” she said to Harry, who eyed the bag of jerky like it was prey. She gave him another piece. “That’s where I’d be without you.”

  Footnotes

  After a quick communal lunch, Nico found herself walking near the back of the group when the little kid asked, “Do you think tomatoes are a fruit or a vegetable?”

  She’d been in the middle of observing Monty and Loretta. It was both sweet and strange to see romantic affection between two people who weren’t your own parents (or characters in a novel), and Nico was surprised to find she was a little jealous. Not that she wanted to hold hands with Monty or Loretta. But Lennon—whose eyes gave her the same queasy feeling she used to get back home on the attic deck, looking out over miles of unknowable woods and thinking, I might like to explore that one day—Lennon was nice to look at.

  Not just his eyes. His hair, too. Waves on waves.

  These were the things Nico was thinking when the little kid asked her opinion regarding tomatoes.

  “Um. I don’t know?” she said.

  “Have you ever had a really good tomato?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe?”

  “You don’t forget something like that.”

  “It’s Kit, right?”

  “Yes.”

  She liked Kit immediately. However young he was, he seemed far older. For one, the stick he’d been using to draw shapes in the snow, he now used as a walking stick, a trait that somehow seemed old-mannish. There was also a cadence to his voice, a tone that suggested a soul much older than its shell. (Further confirmed by his tenderness toward Harry.) Whether this was due to the shared trauma of the group, or simply being a small kid in a world so devoid of small kids, she couldn’t say.

  “I have,” said Kit.

  “You have what?”

  “I’ve had a really good tomato.”

  They walked and talked near the back of the group, their conversation accompanied by crunching snow underfoot, the sun painting the forest thick in a late-morning wash. Kit told her more about the town he was from (a place he referred to simply as Town), about the movie theater he was born and raised in. Apropos of nothing, he said, “I know I’m small. But I’m lightning quick,” and then mentioned someone called Dakota, but immediately clammed up and put a hand on Harry’s head as they walked.

  “I like your dog.”

  “I think he likes you too.”

  “Maybe you guys can come to the Isles of Shoals with us. They’re well stocked and organized. They have solar power and one hundred and eleven residents. According to Carl Meier, they’re probably the only real community left in the whole godforsaken world. I don’t know if they have any dogs there, but I’m sure they’d let in a good old boy like Harry.”

 
Something else in Kit’s voice: the ability to make one melt on the spot.

  “Who’s Carl Meier?”

  “He’s the radio and communications specialist on the Isles of Shoals. It was his voice we heard on Monty’s radio.” Kit went on to explain how crystal radios didn’t require batteries or electrical power, and how this was similar to Lennon’s watch. “He just has to wind it every night. Also, his watch has the city of Boston on it. Behind the hands, I mean. I wish he could come to the Isles of Shoals too, but I guess Boston is Lennon’s destiny. That’s a word I know. It means fate but sounds more dramatic.”

  The inner workings of Kit’s brain reminded Nico of a picture she’d once seen in a book of a unicyclist juggling bowling pins while spinning a plate on his nose. It looked exhausting, but also—you couldn’t help smiling.

  As Kit kept talking (his brain spinning and spinning), she found herself looking toward the front of the group again, her mind wandering to those unknowable places just begging for exploration. From her books, she knew most people had “a type.” She wondered what Lennon’s type was, and also, if her face was as filthy as it felt, and if Manchester was on the way to Boston, would it be assumed that they would travel south together, or would one of them have to ask the other? He seemed nice. She hoped he was nice. Otherwise, she’d completely misread the eyes.

  “Did you know octopuses have nine brains?”

  “Really?”

  Kit reached for something under the collar of his shirt. “One brain to control the nervous system. And one brain for each tentacle.”

  An image: an octopus, bright reddish orange, floating in the deep part of the ocean where the water was black. This happened sometimes, she’d imagine a thing she’d never seen, something she had no business knowing, and yet there it was in her head like she was part of the world’s collective conscience.

  “Have you seen one?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “An octopus?”

  “A swarm.”

  Images of the buzzing whitetail, and the darkness of the Farmhouse cellar, her father’s off-key singing as her mother read psalms. “I’ve seen one,” she said.

  “So you know.”

  “Know what?”

  Time passed, there was no way of knowing how much, and when Kit spoke, it sounded muffled, the footnote of a whisper—Nico wasn’t even sure it was for her. “How they’re bigger than mountains. How they operate as one, like they have nine brains. One brain for the central nervous system. One for each tentacle.”

  The swarm that had descended on that whitetail had seemed, in the moment, of mythical proportions. Only now did it occur to Nico that it might actually have been on the smaller side of the spectrum.

  Beside her, Kit reached out to pet her dog. “Good, Harry. That’s a good old boy.”

  Reincarnations

  The day passed, and behind them the sun began its descent. Nico turned to catch a glimpse of its slow death in the west, and she wondered if a sunset was inherently beautiful, or if its beauty was found in this: that it would soon come back to life.

  Loops

  Bright tongues lapped wildly, the campfire in full form.

  Nico added a fourth tally to her hand. The first three had begun to fade, so she traced over them, trying not to be too disappointed they hadn’t reached the Merrimack today. She imagined her father back at the Farmhouse, sitting alone in the library, adding a fourth tally to his own hand (hopefully). Something she had not considered until now: being alone in the Farmhouse. Say what you will of the woods, its dangers and depths and infinite unknowns, but the wild was a place you got geared up for. Much harder, getting geared up to be alone in your own house.

  “What’s that?”

  In the sleeping bag beside hers, Lennon was propped up on one elbow, winding his watch. Kit was right, and not only about the winding: in the firelight, Nico made out a polished silver band, and on its face, a city skyline.

  He pointed to her hand, where she’d just been tracing the hash marks.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s . . . a long story.”

  “Oh, never mind, then. I’ve got places to be.”

  Nico knew there was some allotted amount of time in which it was socially acceptable for one person to look at another, but as to the length of the allotment she had no idea.

  Done winding, Lennon strapped his watch back on. “You want to hear my theory?”

  Everyone had gone to bed, wedged as close to the fire as they could without getting singed. Someone was snoring; the flames danced, the sky was open, and while it was possible others might hear them, it seemed unlikely they would keep anyone up so long as they spoke quietly.

  “Your theory on what?”

  “Loops,” he said.

  “Loops.”

  “Ever heard the term eternal recurrence?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Okay, so. You know how everyone thinks this is the end of the world?”

  Nico had overheard conversations between her parents about the way things used to be, watched them pick up a Metallyte pouch and stare at it, heard them talk about their last refrigerator like it was a beloved childhood pet. She’d heard enough to understand that those who’d had a life prior to the Flu, and those who hadn’t, stood on opposite ends of an infinite chasm. For Nico, there was no How Things Used to Be; there was only How Things Are.

  “Not everyone thinks that,” she said.

  “Okay, well, some people think these are the end-times.”

  “Are you one of those people?”

  Lennon had a way of smiling without smiling. “One of the adults who raised me—Jean—she used to have this old television. Ran it off a generator until fuel gave out. I was young. I have vague memories of watching the thing, but there were certain shows and movies she’d seen so many times, she could basically recite them word for word. Sci-fi was her favorite.”

  “I know sci-fi.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Even though she hadn’t cracked the book open in years, Nico could picture its exact place on the shelf of the Farmhouse library. “I had a book about a princess in space. It had these swords that lit up, and this—anxious golden robot.”

  “C-3PO. That’s Star Wars. Classic series, according to Jean.”

  The fire was warm, the fire was comfort, and as Lennon spoke, Nico imagined their campsite from above, how they were splayed around the flames in a circular pattern like a fiery mosaic, and she thought, This. This is what I had in mind.

  New people, new voices, new worlds.

  “There was some show I can’t remember the name of,” he said. “About a planet where humans create machines that think for themselves, and eventually realize they don’t really need the humans who created them. So they wipe out most of the planet, all but like—fifty thousand people, and those survivors load up on a fleet of spaceships and go cruising around the universe looking for a new home. The robots give chase, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Long story short, eventually the humans find some other hospitable planet, and they’re like, ‘Welp, good enough,’ and basically set up shop. New planet. Fresh start. Happy ending.”

  “I’m guessing not?”

  His almost-smile developed into its fullest form. “They fast-forward hundreds of thousands of years and show how humans do to this planet the same thing they’d done to the one before it. Create technology, the tech advances, the tech destroys most of us, and what few survivors are left go off in search of some other hospitable planet to torch.”

  “Ruin the ending for me.”

  “I figure the odds of you finding a working generator connected to a working television connected to a working disc player that happens to have that particular sci-fi disc are roughly one in a googolplex.”

  “That’s a bleak outlook.”

>   “I’m looking out, and it is bleak.”

  Nico waved an arm toward the stars. “Agree to disagree.”

  As if she’d reminded him what a beautiful sky it was, he shifted onto his back, stared up.

  “We didn’t get robots,” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “We didn’t get robots. Or machines. Just Flies.”

  Lennon pinched the cinnamon on the ground by his bag. “At some point it occurred to me that I didn’t know anything other than what Jean and Zadie told me.”

  It wasn’t that Nico hadn’t considered to question how things went down; it was that she hadn’t considered to question how her parents said things had gone down. But maybe she should have. Maybe their downward spirals had started long before their illnesses. And Nico found herself telling this person she barely knew things she’d only ever thought. “Growing up, my dad and I were really close. We still are, but it’s—different. At some point, around thirteen or fourteen, I’d catch him looking at me like . . . he’d seen me somewhere and was just trying to place my face. I’d be reading. And I’d look up and find him staring at me with that look. Like I was a stranger in his house, someone he recognized from someplace else.”

  She stopped talking, and suddenly wished she could suck the words back up, swallow them down, let them age and die in the place they were born.

  “‘All of this has happened before,’” Lennon said. “‘And all of this will happen again.’”

  “A little dramatic, but okay.”

  He tapped his skyline wristwatch. “Jean gave this to me. Said I had to keep it wound, keep it clean. She said time was like a distant lover—you take care of it, even though you can’t see it. I think about that when I think about eternal recurrence. Like how maybe we don’t live on a timeline. Maybe it’s a time-ring. And at some point in the rotation, everything, everywhere, eventually falls apart. Doesn’t matter whether the adults lied to us or not, really. Robots, diseases, asteroids, floods, Flies—it may end in different ways, but that shit ends. And just as sure as it does? Reboot. Rainbow. Start over. One of the quotes from that sci-fi show, this thing Jean always said when she told the story—‘All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.’”