“I feel like that sometimes.”
“And this is Sssss. He’s a snake, with arms, and he can shoot spiders from his hands.”
“Is it a specific type of spider, like black widows, or what are those scary ones you have in South Africa?”
“Wolf spiders! Or baboon spiders? Those are the ones that look like tarantulas. Sssss can shoot any kind of spider he wants!”
“Oh, cool, cool.” Jay was flagging.
“And this is their arch-nemesis, Grammaphone, who is an evil old lady with an old record player for her head who wants to adopt all the monster babies and take them in her time machine back to the days when everything was black and white, and you didn’t even have the internet.”
“That’s sounds like a terrible place. Hey, squirt, I’m getting really tired. Can we catch up later?”
“’Kay,” Miles said, slipping off the bed. Cole wasn’t sure who was more relieved.
“C’mon.” She put her arm around her son. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
But Cole only took him back twice more to see his cousin. There were a lot of horrible words that came between them and him. Adenocarcinoma. Gleason score. Distant metastasis. Adjuvant therapy. Recrudescence. Advance directive. And one they only talked about back at home. Assisted dying.
She learned that humans use the word “unbearable” too readily. It turns out that what’s unbearable is living through it. Jay died at home, in his sleep, a month later. Morphine will do that. If you were lucky enough to have access to morphine, if you were among the first.
There was nothing to say, except the unspeakable. The guilt was a brutish animal pacing and snarling in the confines of her rib cage. She was afraid to open her mouth in case she let the animal’s words slip. Thank God. Thank God it was your son and not mine. Knowing that Tayla and Eric were running the resentment counter: How dare you still have a child who is living and breathing?
Anything can become a black hole if you compress it enough. That’s how Tayla reacted: collapsed in on herself under the density of her grief, sucking up the light. Eric went the other way, falling into busywork to keep the pain at bay, trying to cheer up the girls, taking on homework and cooking and cleaning. Offers of help took away the only thing he was holding on to. Devon tried, but it only drove Eric into another room, onto another task.
It made Cole anxious, the way Eric would suddenly notice Miles—if he bustled into the room to find him sitting on the couch with the girls, all of them staring intently at the TV like the commercials were the best thing ever—and flinch. Every single time. Miles felt it too. He was clunky with nerves, dropping things, tripping on the stairs. “When can we go home?” he’d asked, repeatedly.
They should have gone home.
“We don’t belong here,” she argued in heated whispers to Devon. There was other family: Eric’s parents and sisters, who were eager to offer support. Miles needed stability. He needed to be at home. He needed his dad’s full attention.
And she was afraid it was contagious. She didn’t know it was already too late. They agreed to a compromise. A three-month contract job in Oakland, so Devon could be closer to Tayla and the family. But then Eric got sick, and so did Devon, and then no one was flying anywhere. You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months. You just can’t.
5.
Cole: Wicked Things
They should have been farther along by now. But paranoia will slow you down when you’re avoiding the highways and the possibility of police checkpoints. Dogs can sniff out gender. Cops get annoyed when you can’t show them proper ID. There’s probably an APB out on them. Murderer. Drug smuggler. Boy trafficker. Wanted felon.
Bad mother.
Bad mother is the worst thing you can possibly be.
But off-the-beaten-track has its own risks. Lack of food and gas stations, for example, or fallen trees across the road that mean having to turn around and retrace eighty miles, pretending not to be crying with frustration behind the sunglasses she claimed from the last abandoned gas station. Pathetic.
The tank is down to a quarter full and they need to refuel. And the bitch about the new world order: it requires money, same as the old one. She feels betrayed by all the apocalypses of pop culture that promised abandoned cities ripe for the looting. But then again, they also haven’t encountered any shambling undead, small-town utopian havens with dark underbellies, highwaymen, or crazed militias. There are a surprising number of towns still functioning and other cars on the road. Proof of life. Aluta continua. But they’re not going to be able to continua much longer without cash money, and the prices posted on the last gas station they passed were sell-both-kidneys expensive. Watching the burning oil fields in Nigeria and Saudi on the news, the riots in Qatar during those long weeks of Devon being hollowed out by the fucking cancer. What’s the worst part of acting like it’s the end of the world as we know it? Inability to imagine that it might not be.
She’s so unprepared for all this. Miles needs a Ripley, a Furiosa, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, and instead, he’s got her. Commercial paper artist. Ex-commercial paper artist. At least she picked up some things over the last few years. Thank you, military quarantine and all the courses on previously male-dominated skills they offered to keep the surviving relatives occupied. Now she can shoot a gun, do a basic tune-up on a car, and perform essential life-saving paramedic skills. But she can’t fly a helicopter and she can’t forge a passport, and if Miles gets really sick, or she does, they’re fucked. What she needs is cash money in hand, to pay for gas, and a hot meal, and to get online, email Keletso, ask for help, figure out a plan. The great escape from America.
Or you could turn yourself in.
Over your dead body, husbandguy, she snipes back. Not an option. Not with everything they’ve already been through. There are consequences to her actions. The sky is striped with pink and orange above the forest lining the road, and she takes the off-ramp for Lake Tahoe on a whim, remembering a cigarette ad in the cinema from when she was a kid and such things were still legal. She can’t remember the brand, but it featured impossibly pretty white people in neon eighties ski gear swiping down the mountain. She had never seen snow before, and it seemed so glamourous and cool. And the dumb slogan that had dated so badly, what was it? People with a taste for life. That’s it. That’s her. Taste for life, and a different kind of future from the one everyone else wants to prescribe for them.
As she descends the winding road, they can see down to the lake and the cabins arrayed along the shore, a single speedboat tearing a snow-white rip across the dark blue water below. On the main drag, it’s ski shops and tattoo parlors and internet cafes and a bustle and a hustle on the streets. It would be so easy to forget, to think it’s life as normal, until you realize, again, a punch to the gut, that there are no men among the people going about their business this evening. Should be used to it by now, she knows, but they haven’t been out in the world for a while.
She picks a likely spot. The Bullhead Grill & Bar is all lit up like Christmas, with a parking lot full of cars and people inside bathed in a welcoming yellow light.
Not a trap.
Maybe, she thinks. “You ready, tiger? To deal with actual human beings again?”