The Living

WE

NORA PUSHES OPEN THE HATCH that says no roof access and climbs out onto the roof. She understands why it’s not recommended—there are no safety railings and the whole structure sways slightly like the deck of a ship—but she likes it up here. She likes stepping outside the grid of human traffic. She likes being close to the sky. She never feels more free than when she’s on a rooftop.

She also wants some privacy so she can smoke a joint. It’s been a long day in the foster home.

She sits cross-legged next to one of the huge metal eyelets on the corner of the roof and rests an elbow on the support cable that runs through it. She can feel the vibrations of a dozen other buildings in the cable. Footsteps. Music. Even voices. This might just be her imagination, but then again, her senses have seemed strangely acute lately. Yesterday, one of the kids who doesn’t talk gave her a hug, and his heartbeat felt like code. I’m a bad thing, it seemed to tell her. The world doesn’t want me.

“You’re a beautiful thing, L,” she told him, “and we want you to come back as soon as you’re ready.”

Immediately, L began to cry.

Nora lights the joint and inhales. She holds in the smoke, waiting to feel the relief. Living here was already hard when it was just a few dozen orphans with ordinary traumas—nothing more exotic than abuse or abandonment, nothing she hadn’t experienced herself. But since the repopulation, things have gotten more complicated. And all this on top of her actual job as a nurse. Stitching bodies by day, hearts by night…she needs a break.

She takes a long pull of the sweet, floral vapor. Her nerves begin to uncoil.

“Got you!”

Her brother’s head pops up from the hatch.

Nora smiles in spite of herself. She pats the spot next to her and Addis drops onto it, dangling his feet over the edge.

“One puff,” Nora says, handing him the joint. “And if you start rambling about ‘the Higher’ again, I’m cutting you off for good.”

He looks at her with that cryptic smile that unnerves her even as it fascinates her. He doesn’t talk about his days in the space between Living and Dead—it only slips out when he’s high, whether on sugar, coffee, or more potent substances—but he knows something. Sometimes, Nora feels like she knows it too, though she can’t quite put it into words.

“L remembered his name,” Addis says. He takes a quick puff and returns the joint. “It’s Levi.”

Nora nods. She watches the traffic in the narrow streets below, like blood flowing through a brain. “You’re good with them, Addy. You’re good for them.”

He shrugs.

“You know they look up to you, right?”

“But they’re all older than me,” he says. “They’re teenagers.”

Nora takes another puff and smiles. “Technically, so are you.”

A month ago, he would have gone cold at this. He struggled at first with his ambiguous identity. He couldn’t decide which group he belonged to, who he should play with, how he should talk and behave. He would bristle at any inquiry about his age—some older folks even questioned his race when his yellow eyes gleamed in the sun—but now he just smiles with sheepish amusement.

“I’m weird, aren’t I?”

Nora laughs. “Yes you are, Adderall. The weirdest.”

“Marcus is here.”

Nora pauses with the joint near her lips. “Here? Right now?”

“He’s at the front door.”

She looks at him sideways. “Can you…sense him or something?”

“He knocked earlier. I told him I’d go get you.”

“He’s been at the door this whole time?”

Addis grins.

“You little shit,” Nora chuckles and flicks the joint over the roof. She pauses at the hatch opening and turns around. “I’m glad you’re here, Addy.”

A brief hesitation, a cloud across his face, then: “Me too.”

“I love you. Even though you’re a little shit.”

His grin returns.

Nora descends the tower past floor after floor of other little shits. She pauses at the elementary level and peeks in the door for the day’s final check. She sees Gael and Gebre sipping coffee at the kitchen table, splitting their attention between the stack of essays in front of them and the dozen rambunctious kids around them. They look happy. All of them. The boy Nora knew as L is sitting in the corner, but he’s not alone. He’s playing a video game with a girl about his age. He’s laughing.

“Welcome back, Levi,” she whispers. Then she hurries down the stairs.

She resists the urge to check the hallway mirror, but her hand sneaks a quick hair primp before she opens the front door.

“Sorry about that,” she says with an apologetic eye-roll. “Addy’s into pranks lately.”

Marcus shrugs. “I did kind of kill him once. I’d say he has a lifetime pass to fuck with me.”

Nora smiles, then pauses to look him over. Still the baggy jeans, but he’s traded in the t-shirt for a button-up. He looks trimmer, his bulk a little more contained. Considering how many surgeries he’s been through lately, this probably doesn’t mean much, but still, it’s always intriguing to watch a person change.

“So we’re really doing this?” she says, eyeing him cautiously. “A date?”

He shrugs again, waves a hand over his stomach, his ribs, the scars of all the wounds Nora stitched. “You’ve already been inside me. What’s a couple drinks?”

“Jesus,” Nora groans, clapping a palm over her eyes. “Let’s go before you charm me to death.”

They don’t say much as they cross the town and ascend the winding maze to the Orchard. They take stools at the bar, elbows resting on the rough texture of a hundred tiny carvings—jokes, quotes, doodles, or sometimes just names, alone or joined with plus signs. They remain lost in private contemplation until the sound of whiskey filling their tumblers pulls them out.

Marcus raises his glass. “Do you toast?”

“Last time I did, it was R’s toast. He said ‘to life.’”

“R,” Marcus chuckles, shaking his head. “Love the guy, but what a cheeseball.”

Nora raises her glass and clears her throat. “To world peace!”

“World peace!”

They clink their glasses and sip their whiskey. Nora likes the way its warmth spreads over her cannabis-cooled nerves. She instinctively glances at the TV above the bar, but all four of the Orchard’s flatscreens have bullet holes in them. She’s curious to see what the world is up to now that it’s able to tell her, but she can watch the news some other time. Right now she’s on a date.

“It’s packed in here,” Marcus observes, glancing around the crowded room and almost shouting to be heard. “There’s really only one bar for the whole stadium?”

“One bar for the whole city, unless the Nearlies have started opening businesses.”

Marcus watches people drink. He watches friends laughing, couples cuddling, hips moving to the noisy rock on the speakers.

“Maybe I’ll open one,” he says, and begins to nod to himself. “Maybe I’ll open a bar.”

“You could be your own bouncer,” Nora offers.

“Nah,” he says, shaking his head. “Tired of all that.” He smiles at the ceiling with a distant twinkle in his eye, then turns toward Nora, inviting her in. “I’ll be the piano player.”

Nora hides her grin behind her whiskey. It occurs to her that the idea of world peace might no longer be such a punchline. Naive? Probably. Premature? Certainly. But laughable? These days, she’s not so sure.

“Put that one on the corner stack.”

“It’s too high. It’ll fall.”

“You hold that one and Alex, you hold that one, and I’ll put the curtain rod across. The weight will keep them up.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah, now I’ll just…there. Perfect!”

Sprout stands back to admire their progress and almost trips on the pile of architecture books scattered at her feet. She got them mostly for the pictures—from log cabins to government buildings, she soaks in the visual language and wonders what it means—but she has recently started skimming the text, too. She has no shortage of passion, but she’d like to buttress it with some solid theory.

Because this is no ordinary couch fort. In the history of sofa architecture, there has never been such ambition. Ten sectionals worth of cushions went into its construction, as well as nontraditional materials like road signs, car doors, and the awning of a liquor store. It fills the entire living room of this spacious suburban home, a house within a house. Sprout wonders if R and Julie will be mad when they get back, but she doubts it. The plywood wall patches, the bloodstained carpet…there are other houses they could have claimed if they wanted tidy lives.

“See how the curtain makes the south wall?” Sprout says, running her hand across the gauzy linen. “So you get privacy but still have natural light. You need lots of light when you’re working with small spaces.”

“Lots of light,” Alex says.

“Obviously,” Joan says.

Sprout is eyeing the last corner of unused square footage, thinking they could probably fit another closet in there, when she feels her stomach growl. “I need a snack,” she tells her friends. “But let’s start thinking about bathrooms.”

She drifts through the house, running her fingers along the walls, feeling the pebbled texture of the fresh paint, a bright yellow that will eventually strain their eyes and be covered with something softer, but for now…a statement.

The kitchen radio is on. So is the dining room radio and the living room radio and the bathroom radio, each playing a different broadcast. The effect is chaotic but exciting, like conversation noise at a party. The one in the kitchen is playing music, so she turns it up while she digs in the fridge. There’s something special about this music. It’s not an ancient recording of long-dead musicians—it’s live. It’s raw and messy, full of gleeful mistakes, and between songs the musicians are talking to each other.

She emerges from the fridge with an apple and some cheese from the neighbor’s sheep, tucks the portable radio under her arm, and takes her picnic to the back yard. Usually she’d invite her friends to join her, but she feels a need to be alone. Something about the music. The hue of the light outside. A faint whisper from somewhere in her head.

Silvery clouds roil above her, and the bristly yellow grass seems to reach toward them, begging for something to drink. The wet summer gave way to a dry autumn. The arid air makes her lips flaky, but it’s cool and crisp and electric.

“I love the new air,” she says to the air. “It’s like taking a bath in fizzy water. Can you feel it, Dad?”

She sets the radio in the grass and sits cross-legged in front of the marker.

“No one knows what’s different. They’re still trying to figure it out. But I bet you know, don’t you? I hope you can feel it too.”

No one knew Abram Kelvin well enough to guess what he’d want for his grave. What he would have wanted is no grave at all, believing he neither needed nor deserved a memorial. But as he often failed to realize while alive, the threads of his life were tied to many others, and they believed differently. So his daughter chose his marker: a small plank of lumber from the ruins of a nearby house, unpainted, unvarnished, soon to become earth. For his epitaph: just his name. The rest will be kept in the minds of the living, until they too become earth and surrender their stories to the Library.

“It’s like your drawings,” Sprout says, addressing her father’s grave though she knows he’s not in it, just a place to rest her eyes. “Remember when you showed me those drawings from when you were little? They were so ugly! You sucked at drawing, Dad!” She laughs and takes a bite of the apple, wild grown, unbelievably juicy and sweet. “But the ones from later were a little better ’cause you were more grown up. And if you didn’t quit, you probably would’ve gotten really good and drawn something really pretty. So it’s like that, you know?”

The clouds are shifting fast. Bright spots appear and sunlight bursts through, warming Sprout’s face with a golden glow. “Except the world’s not gonna quit,” she says, dribbling apple juice onto her chin. “’Cause we’re not gonna let it.”

She stuffs some cheese in with the apple. The combined flavor is strange, but she resists the impulse to spit it out, and as she continues to chew, her puckered lips ease into a smile of pleasure. Another discovery. Every day a new amazement. She opens her mouth to start talking about food, then closes it and cocks her head. She clicks off the radio and listens.

A distant whisper, like leaves rustling in a mile-high tree. She looks up. She listens. Her smile widens, revealing new teeth growing into the gaps.

“I know you did, Dad,” she says through a mouthful of apple and cheese. “And I know you still do.”

Ella Desconsado watches from upstairs as Sprout chats with her father. Ella is glad she undertook the trek from her bed to the window. She stumbled a few times, wracked by fits of coughing; she wasn’t sure she would make it, but knowing what she knew about this day, she felt a need to see what she saw. Now she turns around, takes a deep breath, and begins the return journey.

She wishes Julie were here to scold her for straining herself. When she woke up this morning filled with certainty, she almost asked the girl to stay. But Ella has never been one to make a scene over herself. She never liked big birthday parties. Her wedding was simple and intimate. Life is full of milestones and markers, transitions and rites of passage, so why should this one be any fussier than those?

She falls back into bed with a deep sigh and clicks on her radio. It takes some force to move the dial away from Fed FM, but once it’s free of the sediment, it glides easily. Most of the stations are still personal pleas, signal flares for lost loved ones—we’re alive, come find us, we’ll be waiting—but a few public programs have started to appear. Ella pauses on a man talking about agriculture. Then a woman describing a new town founded by Nearlies. Then a conversation in Spanish about blasting down the border wall. Finally she settles on her favorite show.

“Hello question-marked world, this is Huntress Tomsen with the Unknown Almanac, broadcasting today from South Cascadia, specifically Post, specifically the belly of Barbara, my studio on wheels. Before I serve delicious news and ripe updates I want to introduce you to the…to my friend, Julie. Julie Cabernet, one of Post’s new civic organizers, and also my friend.”

“Hi, Huntress. Hi, everyone.”

Ella smiles. Her lungs tighten and her breaths grows shallower. Spots appear in her vision. She allows her eyes to close and it feels like releasing a heavy weight. It’s comforting to realize she’ll never have to lift it again.

“What is a civic organizer?” Huntress asks. “What do you do? Your father was an Army general and the city’s commanding officer, are you his successor? Do you lead Security and govern the city? Radio isn’t supposed to have ‘dead air’ so please say things now.”

Julie laughs. “No, I’m not the general. It’s not like that anymore. What I do is…”

Ella feels the darkness behind her eyes deepening, from a dim field of colorful static to a softer, quieter black. She sees Julie the small child, tasting wine for the first time in that roach-infested Brooklyn apartment. She sees Julie the wounded girl without a mother, full of rage but unsure where to aim it, grasping blindly for answers. And she sees Julie the woman—this woman on the radio, this organizer, this leader, calmly explaining how a new world might work.

Ella is overwhelmed. She can’t comprehend the privilege she’s been given, to have seen the things she’s seen, known the people she’s known.

Do you see her, Lawrence? she says into that deepening darkness. Do you see our Julie?

She hears three tiny voices laughing downstairs.

Do you see all our kids?

The room fades. Her body fades. She can breathe freely now, and she takes thirsty gulps of that cool, soft nothing.

Did you ever imagine we’d have a family so big?

She sees light at the edges of the darkness. A warm orange glow like a reading lamp. She must be back in her home, because she’s surrounded by bookshelves. She must be sitting across from her husband with a mug of mint tea, both of them lost in their books yet still alert to each other’s presence. A firm awareness that they’re not alone.

“Lawrence?” Ella says without looking up.

“Yes, Ella,” part of us answers. “I’m here.”

Ella smiles.

I

I STILL ENJOY WALKING. I did a lot of it when I was Dead—back and forth, up and down, around in circles—and the habit stuck with me. When I was Dead, I walked just to make sure I could, to prove to myself I was still here despite all evidence to the contrary. Now I walk because it feels good. Because the scenery fills my head with daydreams. Because I can smell the dirt and the trees. Because I’m free and the world is large and it wants to be discovered.

So I’m walking from the suburbs to the city, where I’ll meet Julie when she gets off work. I hear her on my pocket radio, wrapping up her interview with the Unknown Almanac. She has a good voice for radio, low and smoky—much better than Tomsen’s mousy squeak, I’m afraid—but I can still hear a giddy tremble beneath her calm, and it makes me smile.

“Some people keep asking how we’re going to bring back civilization,” she says. “They want to know how we’ll have peace without an army, how we’ll have prosperity without an economy, who will build their cars and computers and who will mow their lawns. Well, I don’t have those answers.”

I reach the crest of the hill leading down into the city, and I pause to take a picture. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures lately. It’s an old film camera and I haven’t found the equipment to develop the roll, but I’ve heard rumors of someone running a lab in Portland. And even if I never develop them, I can see the shots in my head.

“If the question is what system will solve all our problems and still give us exactly what we had before, then I don’t know what to tell you. How do we make a better world without giving up a single piece of the old one? We don’t. We can’t. That’s a fucking stupid question.”

In the shadow of the stadium, at the bottom of a tall apartment building, steam wafts from a little shop window. I offer the woman a spoon I carved from a cedar branch and she shakes her head. I add a handful of batteries and she nods. I inhale the tangy steam while she works.

“So I guess what I’m saying is…bear with us. Work with us. These are crazy times and no one really knows what to expect, but we have a chance to build something wonderful here, and we’re going to need everyone. So…okay. That’s it from me. Thanks, Huntress. Thanks everyone. Cabernet, out.”

A trail of crushed bones leads up to the old Mercedes, squiggling drunkenly where Julie swerved to run over a few more skulls. There have been no cleanup efforts. The battle has built its own memorial, and it will remain until time sweeps it away. I take a picture of Mercey surrounded by bones—another memorial—and hop into the driver’s seat. I stuff my camera in my bag and pull out my notebook. I have scribbled a few pages when Julie climbs in next to me, slouching into the cracked leather seat with a deep sigh.

“Idiot or lunatic?” she says.

“What?”

“Which did I sound like? Please don’t say both.”

I slip the notepad into my bag, hoping she’s too flustered to notice her name on the page. “You sounded like a leader.”

“A leader!” she laughs. “I don’t even know if we’re going to have those. But thanks.” She pecks me on the cheek and tosses me the keys. “Now will you please get me out of here? I’ve done all the leading I can do for today.”

I start the car and take off like a getaway driver. The tires squeal and so does Julie. I am not the warmed-over corpse I used to be. I can breathe, run, climb, cry, and—finally—I can drive. The only signs that I was ever less than Living are the spots on my calf and shoulder, pale and faded like old, regrettable tattoos, a record of a life I’ll remember forever so that I’ll never go near it again.

I hurtle through town at unsafe speeds, taxing the limits of the old car’s engine, and I honk as we blow past our former neighbor’s new downtown apartment. B—Ben—waves to us from the front steps. It looks like he’s going for a walk.

I quit the stunt driving with a satisfied sigh as we cruise onto the freeway. I try not to notice the heavy clouds building overhead. Is the weather going to ruin my little plan? No. Post has been dry for months. I tell myself to stop worrying. Stop giving bad suggestions to the universe.

“Um, R?” Julie says when I drive past our exit. “Where are…”

“I’m taking you out.” I flash her what I hope is a charming grin. “Dinner date.”

She arches her eyebrows with an Oh really? smile and says no more.

Halfway to our destination, it happens. For the first time all autumn, rain falls on Post. The clouds burst like water balloons, dumping torrents into the convertible’s open cab. Julie stubbornly holds her smile, which becomes a parody as her hair droops over her eyes.

“Really need to fix that canopy…” I mumble.

“Yep,” Julie says, trying not to laugh.

She doesn’t ask any questions as I pull into Oran Airport. I’m sure our destination was no surprise, but I hope there are still a few details she hasn’t guessed.

I don’t go to the arrivals gate. There is nothing to see in the terminal. There are no pale crowds shuffling through its halls, waiting for some long-canceled flight. Those people have changed their itineraries and gone on to new destinations, and the airport is empty again.

I take a service road onto the airfield. The rain has turned months of dust into a slick layer of mud and I’m tempted to do some donuts as the first half of my surprise comes into view, but I don’t want to interrupt Julie’s reaction.

“The wings are on!” she says. “Are they…is it finished?”

“Almost. They’re saying one more week.”

Out on the runway, surrounded by scaffolds and tool carts, air compressors and solar panels, David Boeing is almost healed. The truck that hauled it here waits off to the side, its Axiom logo exed out with spray-paint, but the crew of technicians has gone home for the day. Julie and I have the place to ourselves.

Before I’ve quite finished parking she hops out and runs a circle around the plane, wiping rain out of her eyes so she can examine the repairs. Sheets of aluminum taken from other planes form a multi-colored patchwork on the fuselage, and the new engine doesn’t quite match the others.

“They said it’ll take some special care,” I tell Julie, “but it’ll fly. So if you want to start working on that pilot license…”

Julie grins at me through gaps in her wet hair. Then she whirls around and runs up the stairs to the entrance. Hoisting my bag over my shoulder, I follow her into the warm, dry shelter of the cabin.

I find her sitting in first class, waiting expectantly. I set my bag on a chair and begin to lay out our picnic. Two bottles of beer. Two paper takeout cartons. Two sets of chopsticks.

Julie sniffs. Her eyes widen. “Is that…?” She hops down onto the floor and rips open her carton. A little puff of steam rises from a pile of fresh pad thai. “Where?” she says, looking at me like I’ve performed a miracle.

“From a restaurant. We have restaurants now.”

She lunges forward and kisses me, not a peck this time but something deep and searching, and for a moment I think she might tear my clothes off right here and now. Then she pulls back and takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says, giving me a wryly demure smile. “Shall we eat?”

The noodles are tangy and sweet. The tofu is dense and spicy. I savor the feeling of my face flushing, sweating, every cell in my body limber and alive.

We eat in silence. My record player is gone, but in lieu of music we have the cockpit radio scanning the long range bands. All static so far, but it’s a soft, pleasant static, like ocean waves.

Julie sucks down her last noodle and takes a sip of beer. “I see you taking a lot of pictures lately,” she says. “Think photography might be your job or whatever? Your ‘contribution’?”

I shrug.

“Tomsen’s starting a video feed for the Almanac. Maybe you could be, like…a photojournalist.”

“I like taking pictures,” I say, staring into the mouth of my beer, which I haven’t tasted yet, “but I don’t think that’s it.”

“Any other ideas?”

I hesitate a moment, then reach into my bag and toss her my notebook. I take a long pull off the beer as she flips through the pages. When she looks up, there’s a strange mixture of emotions on her face.

“Writing?” she says. “You want to be a writer?”

Another drink. “Maybe.”

“Is that because…” She pauses, as if unsure how to say it and also whether she should say it, but she says it. “Is that because Perry wanted to?”

I shake my head. “Perry taught me a lot. He let me borrow his past until I could find my own.” I nod toward the notebook. “But that’s all me.”

She searches my face for a moment. Then she flips back to the first page and starts to read.

My cheeks flush again, this time not from the spice, and I start talking just to fill the silence. “I’ve always been better at the world in my head but I think that’s okay because we need stories, right? Dreams are how we process reality, right? Even evolution, the ultimate pragmatist, thought we needed dreams for something, so I just think if—”

Julie holds up a hand, still looking at the notebook, and I finally shut up.

“‘I was dead, but it wasn’t so bad,’” she reads. “‘I’d learned to live with it.’”

I tip the bottle back again, but somehow it’s empty. Is there a leak?

“R,” she says, looking up from the page. “You’re writing a memoir?”

I shrug, tossing aside the bottle like it’s betrayed me.

A smile spreads across her face. “Am I in it?”

“You’re the main character.”

She looks down as if intending to read the whole thing right here. I snatch it out of her hands.

“Fine, fine,” she says. “I’ll wait till it’s finished. Although…” She cocks her head. “…when will that be? How do you finish your life story while it’s still in progress?”

“This is part one.” I tuck the notebook into my bag. “Give me a few more decades for the rest.”

The roar of the rain on the roof suddenly stops, leaving only the radio static. We both get up and peek through the windows. The world outside has been scrubbed clean. The mud is gone from the runways; dust and grime rolls off the plane’s wings in brown rivulets, leaving bright white behind. All throughout the airport, dry grass reaches through cracks in the concrete, and I imagine it drinking up the rain, waking its sleeping cells, beginning to flush with green.

Behind me, in the cockpit, a voice cuts through the static.

Halló? Þetta er Griðarstaðsborg, Ísland, með okkar árlega kall til Ameríku. Er einhver á lífi?

Julie stares at me. “Is that…?”

I’m not sure what it is, but I smile as she bolts for the cockpit.

“Hello?” she says into the receiver. “Hello—halló, um…Ensku? Tala ensku?”

I remain at the window, content to listen as Julie reaches across the globe and greets whoever lives there. The exhausted rainclouds are beginning to disperse, gliding aside like vast curtains, and I watch a single patch of light form near the horizon. I hear a melody in my mind, incredibly distant, like I’m hearing it through a wall between worlds.

The clouds are lifting…the window’s open…time to grow a pair of wings.

Where have I heard this song? Whose voice is that singing it to me? I close my eyes to remember, and my head floods with pictures. Pages. Lives that aren’t mine and lives that aren’t yet anyone’s—lives still waiting to be lived. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past, but I have rarely looked at the future. I look at it now. It towers above me, its ceiling so remote that I’m not sure it has one. Just a light that grows brighter the farther away it gets, shining from distant books too beautiful to understand.

Outside, the glossy wet runway glows gold in the sunset, but this is not the Last Sunset. There is no such final dusk. No death. No ending. No ceiling to stop our ascent. The ladder goes up forever, and we have just begun to climb.